Spacefem's Weekly Wikipedia Pregnancy Blog: 17 weeks pregnant

Quickening is feeling the baby move.

Take my advice and don't obsess with the "was that it? was that not it?" because trust me, nothing good comes from the wondering! At 17 weeks your baby could still fit in the palm of your hand - maybe you can feel it, but you'll never be sure.

This is another one of those topics where movie pregancy will be totally different from real pregnancy. In movie pregnancy, a woman is walking around innocently when she suddenly exclaims, "A kick!" and puts her hand on her stomach in the exact place the kick happened. And everybody else gets to see it too! I saw an episode of "Grey's Anatomy", a medical show no less, where the barely pregnant Dr. Grey feels a faint movement that everyone else has to tell her is the baby. Then the next scene is her sitting in bed with her husband that night, he has his hand on her flat belly and they're rejoicing in all these dinosaur-size kicks and punches.

It took me weeks to tell that the movements I was feeling were actually a baby, and even then it wasn't kicks, it was the big movements, like when she rolled over like a floppy fish. That was at like 22 weeks? So all this talk about people feeling movements at 12 or 14 weeks... I blame the movie pregnancies. I thought I felt something at 14 weeks but who knows? And who cares? It's so much more fun when it's obvious, so just wait until then. If you say you're feeling movements everybody will want to annoy you by touching your belly anyway.

Late in pregnancy, like 33 weeks, it gets really fun. You can tell when a foot or bottom is sticking out, poke at it, it'll MOVE, everybody can see. You can play "screw with your baby" before she's even born. That's wholesome fun that you get to look forward to.

And then just to add weirdness, for weeks after your baby is born, you can feel phantom kicks. No one can explain it. You know there's no baby in there. But you're so used to feeling it, you swear something is happening. It's like laying in bed after spending a day on a boat and feeling like the earth is swaying beneath you - it doesn't just stop. Baby movements become such a part of your brain that they don't go away, even when you're holding your newborn and they're touching you only from the outside.

This week's articles

Month	Week	Day	Article
3	17W,0D	119	Agnes Sampson
3	17W,1D	120	Nurse midwife
3	17W,2D	121	Quickening
4	17W,3D	122	Patty Bartlett Sessions
4	17W,4D	123	Baby Mama (film)
4	17W,5D	124	Karlene Davis
4	17W,6D	125	Pregnant patients' rights in the United States