Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Fumbling Numbers

I've never been what you might call a whiz-bang mathmetician, finding numbers to be quite a baffling part of my daily existence, and that paired with my ever-progressing case of "mommy brain" (an apparantly irreversible brain melting condition beginning at conception in which the baby slowly siphens away your brain cells) has left me quite dazed and confused of late.  I just can't seem to wrap my brain around this whole 9 months/40 weeks thing.  It doesn't help that during pregnancy 4 weeks equals 1 month, which means that 40 weeks is actually 10 months, although they begin counting the 40 weeks two weeks prior to conception, because supposedly that's easier to track, so technically a full-term pregnancy is only 38 weeks (and lots of people deliver early), which sorta helps me get where the whole "9 months" thing came from, but ultimately I'm utterly and totally confused at all times about just how long the bun has technically been in the oven.  (To make matters worse, I'm highly impatient when it comes to baking, resulting in many an undercooked pastry, which I readily devour anyway because I'm a) pregnant, and therefore ALWAYS HUNGRY, and b) convinced that I've waited an eternity already and just don't care.  Let's hope that I give the baby enough time to cook properly!)

The funny thing about the whole pregnancy calculation issue is that my starting date is Jan 1st, which should seem to make this counting thing easy as pie.  It should, but yet somehow it doesn't.  Basically, I'm just not a numbers lady.  

For what it's worth, I did the math for you all and today starts my 20th week.  Holy Moley--that's half-way!  Jeepers, I best start the nesting soon...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i'm so glad you wrote this post! i have the same struggle! and i too am very un-mathmatically inclined, even pre-pregnancy. i could have written the same post word for word. i'm still confused at what my actual week/month is. but i'm due august 1--maybe that's all that counts!

Beth said...

HA!

I'll never forget when I was practicing at giving TESTS and you were my guinea pig for a math test, and I scored you wrong into the lowest category possible. :) As I recall, you are just fine at math, upon closer examination ;)

Rebecca said...

I never got why they started counting weeks before a woman was even pregnant! Doesn't make any sense to me...it basically means you are 2 weeks pregnant the second your egg is fertilized! What?? Oh well, since I'm not a doctor, I don't get to make up any rules about it. My co-worker just had her first baby and she was signed up on some website that when you put your due date in, it would email you at the beginning of every week to tell you what week you were and how big the baby would be, etc...I'm sorry I don't know the name but you can probably google something like that! :)