Pregnancy Week 24 – Time To Get Planning

Baby is getting bigger by the minute, but you may be experiencing some annoying new aches and pains that you may have never connected with expecting at all!

Your Baby in Week 24 of Pregnancy

Right now, Baby’s face is almost completely formed, right down to the eyebrows and eyelashes, although it is still rather flat, something that will change as they continue to accumulate the fat deposits that need to fill it out.

Baby’s skin is gaining more of an opaque quality too, and beginning to take on a pinkish glow, not because of their eventual skin tone and color, which is still not set yet but because the underlying blood vessels are really starting to fill up and work harder and small capillaries are beginning to form, branching off the main veins arteries.

Although were it to happen they would be in for a battle, technically Baby is what the medical profession calls ‘viable’ now. That means that were they to be born right now, thanks to some major advances in medical science over the last several decades they would stand a good chance of surviving and eventually thriving. It is not something that you would ever want to experience, but it can be a bit of a comforting thought to keep in the back of your mind.

Your Body in Week 24 of Pregnancy

As Baby grows faster and faster by the minute the size of your bump will be noticeably increasing as well, but you still may often feel like a balloon that his been blown up just a little too much, and the bloated feeling can be very uncomfortable. This will pass though, as your body catches up and expands to fit all that it has to.

Possible New Pregnancy Symptoms in Week 24 of Pregnancy

Around this time in their pregnancy many women begin to experience a strangle tingling sensation in their wrists. It is in fact just what your friends and relatives might be – carpal tunnel syndrome.

Usually of course this is a permanent condition that is associated with doing the type of work work that calls for a great deal of repetitive hand motion such as data entry and typing. It strikes in Mums to be for a rather different reason though.

The overall swelling that occurs in your body, which is increasing daily now, can put undue pressure on the nerves that run the length of your wrist. This pressure then causes numbness, tingling, sharp pain, or sometimes even a dull, nagging ache in your hands, wrists and fingers. The feeling may become more pronounced at night, as the fluids that cause your ankles to swell when you walk and stand during the day redistribute themselves when you lie down in bed. This means the ankle bloat goes down and you find relief in that department, but the swelling increased in your upper body, causing the nasty wrist pains!

There is not a lot you can really do to solve the problem, and it should go away after Baby is born. If the pain becomes very bad try wearing wrists splints to alleviate at least some of it and a visit to a good chiropractor can help as well.

Tips for the Twenty Fourth Week of Your Pregnancy – Time for Another Big Test

Between the twenty fourth and the twenty eighth week of your pregnancy your OB is going to schedule you for a glucose screen. As somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of Mums to be do develop gestational diabetes, and because this is a condition that rarely manifests any early symptoms, these tests really are the only ways that a doctor can determine if his patient has developed it or not.

The test is painless, although a bit of nuisance. When you arrive for your appointment you will be given a cup full of a very sweet, sticky liquid to drink. Being honest, although it may be labelled with a flavour like Cola or orange it does taste dreadful, but if you think of it as a medicine and knock it back in ‘one shot’ it should not be so bad.

After an hour has passed – so bring a book! – the staff will take a small blood sample to measure your current blood sugar level. This will determine how well your body is processing sugars. If the reading is high a Mum to Be is then referred for a second, more complex test to determine is they really do have gestational diabetes or not (as a higher reading does not always, on its own, signal the presence of diabetes)

This is a very important test as the faster that a case of gestational diabetes is spotted the better, as a proper treatment plan can be put into place to help ensure the safe, healthy delivery that every Mum wants to experience.

Get Planning Mummy – Making a Birth Plan

Baby is still weeks and weeks away from entering the world, but it is time for you to start making some solid plans for the day that they do make their big debut.

There are a lot of things about the labour and delivery process you cannot control and some of your plans may have to be changed for medical reasons, but by writing up a birth plan now that can be shared with your OB and their staff, as well as with your chosen maternity centre, it is far more likely that the great majority of your wishes will be respected. Once you are in labour the chances are that no one will have the time to ask you about your personal preferences about everything from who can come into the delivery room to what kind of pain meds you are given after baby is born and a 101 things in between.

There are a lot of things that you might want to include in your birthing plan. To help you get started we have included a typical sample birth plan for you to download, and then personalise, here.