Week 1

Your baby is:

• A hope, a wish, a gleam in your eye.
• Also does not actually technically exist yet.

You are:

• Taking prenatal vitamins just in case.
• Drinking all the wine in the house so it won’t go to waste.
• Completely unaware that this is The Month.

Due to the craziness that is Pregnancy Math, by the time you actually conceive, you are already two whole weeks pregnant. So…congratulations! Only 38 more weeks to go. You’re doing GREAT!

While some of us are obsessive lucky enough to know our child’s conception date down to the minute, more often it’s a tricky thing to know for sure. Did you ovulate early or late? Was it that time on the couch or that night you both couldn’t sleep? In a few weeks an ultrasound will be able to give you a better idea of your embryo’s age, but it won’t change the countdown. The medical establishment prefers to shrug its shoulders and say, “Eff this, when did your last period start? Okay, so…that was Pregnancy Day One. Don’t argue.”

You might be charting, taking your temperature, peeing on ovulation predictor sticks, examining mucus. You might be holding your partner’s hand during an embryo transfer at the fertility clinic. You might just be kind of hoping, or going about things the old-fashioned way: passionate unprotected sex with a strapping young cabana boy named Marco. (Or passionate unprotected sex with your husband or boyfriend, whom I suppose could also be named Marco.)

No matter which way you go about it, I can tell you this: the best stuff is yet to come.