How Many Months Pregnant Am I?

(I’m not really sure how this fits into “The Fitness Cheerleader” but I thought it might be something you’d be interested in, so I’m going to share this little bit of geekiness with you anyways, so bear with me )

As you know, I’m pregnant with my 3rd child. During each of my pregnancies I’ve frequently been asked, “How far along are you?”. This has always left me struggling to come up with an answer, because with each pregnancy I’ve always known (thanks to the amazing pregnancy online calculators and my iPod Touch) precisely how many weeks and days pregnant I am, and how many days it is until the baby is “due”. However, in these casual conversations what people really want to know is how many MONTHS pregnant I am. The problem lies in that medical professionals consider a pregnancy to be 40 weeks and starts the day of your last menstrual period. Every doctor, lab, midwife, and ultrasound appointment I’ve been to has started with the medical professional pulling out a wheel to determine how many weeks pregnant I am – so that doesn’t really help me answer the question.

(As an aside, I have no idea why the professionals still use a paper wheel – I’m sure if they had an iPhone, or an iPod Touch they could download millions of handy apps that would make their jobs easier – but whatever, that’s not really my place to say).

Yesterday I had one of those awkward conversations where I really couldn’t answer how pregnant I am. Since neither one of my previous pregnancies lasted 40 weeks, and I’m 19 weeks now, I answered that I’m about halfway there ie: 4.5 months pregnant. Afterwards I felt like I had lied to this person because technically I’m not 20 weeks yet. So last night I decided to go all geeky and find a way to really figure this all out, here’s what I came up with:

A pregnancy is 40 weeks from your last menstrual period.
Most people consider that to be 9 months.
I divided 40 weeks by 9 months and determined that each month of pregnancy is 30.8 days or 4.4 weeks long.
Therefore, at 19 weeks (19*7=133 days) I am now exactly 4.3 months pregnant (133/30.8=4.318)

In case math isn’t your strong point, I devised this handy chart for you:

1 month = 4w 3d
2 months = 8w 6d
3 months = 13w 1d
4 months = 17w 4d
5 months = 22w 0d
6 months = 26w 3d
7 months = 30w 5d
8 months = 35w 1d
9 months = 40w

(I have never made it to 9 months! Sierra was born at 36w 0d, 8.18 months, and Brooke was born at 38w 4d, 8.7 months)

I warned ya that I’m a geek!