Having a baby is a truly wondrous thing to experience. Many women cherish the time they are pregnant as a form of bonding with the child. Fro the first moments that they know they are pregnant; moms to be are usually deliriously happy and can’t wait to start with the preparations for the coming new arrival.

What Is An Ultrasound?

A pregnancy ultrasound is a device that sends out high frequency sound waves into your womb. As the 3.5 to 7 megahertz sound waves bounce on objects in your womb, the form a “picture” that depicts your baby. The baby’s basic shape and movements can be seen in real time using the ultrasound and even the heartbeat can be sensed by the sound waves and brought into the monitor.

The sound waves do not affect the child or the mother in any way so there is no need to worry about the effects of the pregnancy ultrasound. These sound waves are too high pitched to affect both mother and child and it is localized in the womb area so animals are not even close to hearing it.

Although, primarily used for pregnancy ultrasound purposes, it can also be used to “see” if there are any irregular growths or cysts or abnormalities in the region of preference. Doctors often use the ultrasound to probe for cysts in the stomach region.

Having A Pregnancy Ultrasound

The best way to start your pregnancy timeline is to determine the so called age of the fetus inside you. This can be done by having the pregnancy ultrasound. The pregnancy ultrasound can actually “see” into your womb and give your obstetrician a view of how your baby is doing and how far along he or she is.

Pregnancy ultrasound can also help determine the site of your pregnancy and the accuracy of it. It can also help determine any malformations of the baby and prepare the obstetrician for any medical emergencies as the mother gives birth. A pregnancy ultrasound can also monitor the progress of you child is he or she is growing proportionately or if there is something wrong.

There are now more recent upgrades of the scope of a pregnancy ultrasound. The 3D and 4D pregnancy ultrasound can virtually show the parents’ to be the fully formed face or body of their child. Many parents are aching to see how their child may look and they can do so now with the help of these more recent inventions.

Every mother-to-be wants her baby to be as healthy as it can possibly be, and there are usually certain things that you have to do to ensure that your baby is as healthy as possible when he or she enters this world. Mothers to be are always on the lookout for pregnancy tips to help them be the best temporary shell that they can for their babies, and luckily there is plenty of information available for women in just such a situation, everywhere from the internet to the doctor's office to any clinics or just word of mouth. Pregnancy tips are always passed back and forth between women and so it is important to store and share as much information as you can with fellow mothers.

Don't Smoke
Most of the best pregnancy tips are rather obvious things, like not smoking and staying as far away from secondhand smoke as you can if you don't smoke already. Smoking can be very harmful to the mother and the fetus, resulting in birth complications including but not limited t o lung problems and low birth weight.

Eat Healthy
Another one of the best and most common of the many pregnancy tips is to eat a healthy diet of fruits and vegetables, as well as protein and the necessary vitamins and minerals that a normal body needs, but on a larger scale.

Take it Easy
While pregnant, you probably want to avoid as much strenuous labor as you possibly can. While some exercise is always good to help you maintain a healthy weight with an equally healthy appetite, you want to make sure that you avoid any extremely heavy lifting or grunt work, and stay off of step ladders and chairs and things of that nature as well.

Who to Trust
Pregnancy tips come a dime a dozen, and only your common sense can help you determine what should be believed and what should not be believed. Use your common sense and do what is best for yourself as what is best for your body is usually equally beneficial to the health of your child as well.

If you want more extensive pregnancy tips, your doctor can provide you with just about all of the information that you never wanted on pregnancy and give you the most useful pregnancy tips of anybody. They can tailor their medical advice to your particular medical condition and that of your unborn child and le t you know of exactly what you need to do.

A pregnancy timeline is a week by week or month by month development chart where you can base the progress of you child. It helps parents-to-be to keep track and know what is supposed to be happening during the time period. Excited parent to be can avail of a pregnancy timeline anywhere in the internet. The most useful ones are the week by week outline that show the fetuses’ development and explains what is happening at that period.

Why We Need A Pregnancy Timeline

All parents to be even if they have already experienced an earlier pregnancy needs a timeline. A pregnancy timeline helps you know what to expect and when to expect it. You can monitor the progress of the infant in your womb thru the pregnancy timeline. It will prepare you for any morning sickness or surprises that your infant may have for you like the kicking sensation you are supposed to feel faintly at around 5 months of pregnancy.

The pregnancy timeline also helps our own obstetrician keep track of your child and you. Your doctor can see if you are on the right track or if something is wrong because you are too early in your timeline or too late. This is why it is important to be able to answer the obstetrician’s questions regarding when you had your last period and if you have any notion when the baby was conceived.

What Is In The Pregnancy Timeline?

You can expect to see in week by week pregnancy outline the development of you baby in your womb. Usually, in the 1st to 4th week, the very small blastocyst attaches itself in your womb. This is the time when you start getting the morning sickness, the nausea, the dizziness and other annoying symptoms which some pregnant women seem to sail right through.

In week 5, you would have missed you period and you would have already realized you could be pregnant. In week 6 and 7, the fetus starts to form into a recognizable being with a head, eyes and spine. The arm and leg buds will also be clear at this time.

Weeks 8 – 41 will put the mother to be in many different situations where she has a hard time holding on to her urine or she can not sleep on her back any more. These are wondrous months and you should savor each and every one of them as you and the baby inside you grow with love.

Do you think you might be pregnant? Have you missed your menstrual cycle or have early symptoms of pregnancy? If so, you may want to purchase one of the many over the counter pregnancy tests on the market. They have definitely come a long way from the original tests our mothers used. They are also more accurate with advanced technology.

How Pregnancy Tests Work

When your egg is fertilized, it will travel to your uterus and implant itself in the lining. Once this happens, the fertilized egg starts secreting the pregnancy hormone called human chronic gonadotrophin (HCG). Pregnancy tests that are bought over the counter today are made with monoclonal antibodies that detect traces of HCG. When you take a pregnancy test, you urinate on a stick. Your urine sample will then move up the stick until it reaches the “control” window, which tells you the test is working. The sample will then continue to go up until it reaches the second window, which tells you if you are pregnant. When your urine reaches this portion of the test, if you are pregnant, your urine will react with the monoclonal antibodies creating a distinct change in color causing a line or a color to appear in the window, depending on the brand pregnancy test. The density of the positive result will depend on the amount of HCG you have in your urine. If you are not pregnant, then you will get a negative result.

Different Pregnancy Tests To Choose From

There are many different pregnancy tests on the market that promise 99% accuracy one day after your first missed period. Some pregnancy tests can even predict pregnancy as early as five day before missing your actual period. When choosing to take a test, one to five days before your missed period, you should perform the test first thing in the morning and follow the manufacturer instructions of the to get the most accurate result. However, you could still be pregnant, even if you get a negative reading. If you are pregnant and you get a negative reading, it could be that you didn’t have enough HCG in your urine when you tested and you should repeat the test at a letter date.

Tips

Remember to read the manufacturer’s directions and follow them closely to ensure an accurate reading. Healthcare providers normally recommend waiting at least a week after your first missed period, just in case you miscalculated the days to your next period.

With today’s technology you have several choices when it comes to pregnancy tests. You can go to the doctor of course or you can try a home pregnancy test. Most women do both. Many of them test at home first and then go to the doctor once they find out they’re pregnant or to confirm the pregnancy.

The Rabbit Died

Way before home pregnancy tests and the simple urine test in a doctor’s office, rabbits and mice literally had to die to determine pregnancy. Frogs could give us the result and still live but the others had to die. That is, if the test was positive. That’s where the phrase, “the rabbit died” came from. If someone said that the rabbit died that meant that they were pregnant.

We’ve come a long way since then. For decades now, chemical agents that react with a woman’s urine are able to give the results of the pregnancy tests without any living thing having to suffer. Except perhaps the woman who is waiting for those results.

There are many different choices of home pregnancy test kits today. In 2003 Consumer Reports tested 18 of those kits and reported their findings on CBS’ Early Morning Show. The results were actually fascinating as we were provided with a lot of information that even the manufacturers of these home pregnancy tests don’t tell us.

Each home pregnancy test has a certain sensitivity to the pregnancy hormone hCG. This hormone is produced by the placenta after the embryo attaches itself to the uterine wall. The detection of this hormone is what makes pregnancy tests positive. There is no way to know of course when the embryo will attach itself so by performing pregnancy tests too early you stand a good chance of getting a negative result when you really are pregnant.

Sensitivity Comparisons

The news Consumer Reports gave us about the home pregnancy tests they tested let us know which of the home pregnancy tests would detect hCG at the smallest levels which of course means these are the tests that will provide an accurate pregnancy test result the quickest. The overall winner of the home pregnancy tests was First Response which will detect the smallest hCG levels.

It turns out First Response was able to detect hCG at 6.5 thousandths of an International Unit (6.5 mIU) while the least sensitive of the home pregnancy tests couldn’t detect the pregnancy hormone under 100 mIU. EPT, which was the first home pregnancy test on the market nearly 30 years ago detects hCG at 40 mIU. Knowing these numbers will help you to make a more informed decision when purchasing your home pregnancy test kit.

Almost every home pregnancy test comes with the midstream pregnancy test strip which is a lot easier to use than the test tubes of yesteryear. Even the digital home pregnancy tests use the pregnancy test strip which makes everything easier.

Midstream Pregnancy Test

In most cases, you just hold the pregnancy test strip under your urine stream for about 5 or 6 seconds and follow the directions from there. Some of the home pregnancy test kits state in the directions that you may collect your urine in a cup if you prefer and then dip the pregnancy test strip in the cup instead of holding it under your stream.

Most of the pregnancy test strips will change color when enough urine has been absorbed on the strip. This does make it convenient if you’re using the strip to dip into a cup but not if you only need to hold it in your urine stream for about 5 seconds. When you look at it, it should have changed color if the directions state that it will.

For the home pregnancy test kits that are not digital, you would then place the strip on a flat surface. Some of the kits instruct you to replace the cap first. Then you just wait the two or three minutes and the results should display in the results window. Its better if you have purchased a home pregnancy test with a pregnancy test strip that has a control window, which is a window that will show you a line so you will know what the line should look like if you are pregnant.

Digital Results

Some of the pregnancy test strips show a plus or minus sign to indicate the positive or negative results. Some will show a straight line if you are pregnant and nothing if you are not. The digital pregnancy test strips use the words PREGNANT or NOT PREGNANT to display the results to eliminate any perceived confusion.

With the digital pregnancy test strip kits, you can use the holders again if you choose if you purchased a kit with more than one pregnancy test strip. There are no refill packs available for any of the digital home pregnancy tests so once you finish with the strips you have you can throw away the holder.

If, for some reason, you should decide to perform another test immediately after you performed the last one, you will need to wait until the words are off of the display window before you repeat the test. This can take up to an hour.

Be sure and visit your doctor as soon as you know or think you are pregnant.

You’ll find a pregnancy test stick in many of the different home pregnancy kits on the market today. It’s designed to be held in a woman’s urine stream in order to test for pregnancy. It can also be dipped into a cup if you would prefer to urinate in a cup and then dip the stick into the cup.

What You Need to Know

There are many different kinds of home pregnancy tests you can buy and you need to know the differences between them in order to pick the right one for you. This is not an area to cut corners or to let the price pick the product. Instead, choose the pregnancy test stick that offers the features that you need.

For one thing, you want it to be easy to use and easy to read. You can’t always tell this from looking at the box so doing a little research ahead of time would be a good idea. If it is a line you’re going to be looking for you want a pregnancy test stick kit that will produce a line that’s easy to see and not one that leaves you wondering if the line is really there.

Once you use the pregnancy test stick following all the directions exactly and read the test, throw it away. Some women like to keep the test around and look at it again and again either willing the answer to be different or making sure the answer doesn’t change.

How to Make Sure

What you might find after leaving the used stick sitting for several minutes is what has come to be known as evaporation lines. These lines, while not an indication of pregnancy, tend to show up several minutes later. You can drive yourself crazy staring at the pregnancy test stick if you don’t like the answer you’re getting but it’s not going to change.

One bit of comfort: You’ll rarely see a false positive in a home pregnancy test stick. You’re much more apt to see a false negative and that’s because there’s not enough of the hormone hCG at the time the test is taken and if you wait a few more days the test will then be positive.

If you absolutely have to find out as early as possible, you want to purchase one of the home pregnancy test sticks that show sensitivity to hCG and will pick up a minute amount. Look on the box before you purchase. These will also cost a little more than the less sensitive tests but now is not the time to cut corners.

If you think you might be pregnant or if you get a positive result in your pregnancy test stick see your doctor right away.

When the first home pregnancy test kits came out in 1978 it took 2 hours to get the results. Two nerve wracking hours. It was hard but for those of us who used the first home pregnancy tests waiting for the pregnancy test result was the longest 2 hours of our lives. It was much better than having to wait 2 weeks but there was something about that little test tube just waiting in the next room that kept us on edge.

Patience is a Virtue

The smart woman back then just left the house for a while. The rest of us spent the two hours peeking at the test tube trying hard not to disturb it because we didn’t want to wreck the test. Even though they only cost about $10 then, $10 was a lot more money 30 years ago that it is today.

Today the hardest wait for a woman who uses a home pregnancy test kit is the wait not for the pregnancy test result itself but the wait of the few days leading up to the optimum test day. Even though some home pregnancy tests advertise you can test several days before you even miss your period if you do take the test then it is hard to believe the pregnancy test result and you usually end up testing again in a few days.

False positives are rare so even if you test early and get a positive result you are most likely pregnant. It is when you get the negative pregnancy test result after taking the test early that you continue to wonder if that is the correct pregnancy test result and you find yourself repeating the test in a few days anyway.

Blood Tests

If money is not an object and you absolutely have to know if you are pregnant as soon as possible you can get a blood test from the doctor that will measure any amount of the pregnancy hormone hCG as opposed to the urine test which will only measure a certain level of this hormone. That’s why you can get a negative pregnancy test result when you really are pregnant if there isn’t enough of the hormone in your system yet.

Because the placenta produces the pregnancy hormone, hCG after the embryo attaches itself to the uterine wall, there will be no hCG in your system until that happens. So if you get a negative result after testing before you even miss a period, you may want to repeat the test again in a few days.

We don’t hear about a lot of problems with the home pregnancy test kit. Like everything else though, every now and then a problem or potential problem arises and we hear about product recalls. It happens even in the home pregnancy test industry, although not often.

The home pregnancy test kit first came on the market in 1978. It was the EPT which at the time stood for Early Pregnancy Test but has since changed its name to Error Proof Test. Today, nearly 30 years later there are dozens of pregnancy test kits available online and in the stores.

Recalls

In 2005, the B-Sure pregnancy test kit was voluntary recalled by Harmony Brands because its safety and efficacy could no longer be assured. No word on what the exact problem was but Harmony Brands offered anyone who still had the unused kit a refund and cautioned those who had used the kit to check with their doctor as the results may not have been correct. These pregnancy test kits were sold in dollar stores and convenience stores.

Also in 2005, there were pregnancy test kits sold over the internet along with other home test kits from a Canadian manufacturer. These kits were sent to people in an envelope with the type of test included written on the envelope. This same company was selling home test kits for HIV and syphilis as well. The company, Globus Media, according to Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard did not have FDA approval of the product or permission to sell them in the United States.

Again in 2005, Health Canada warned consumers not to use New Choice, a home pregnancy test kit not approved for sale in Canada. As far as the United States is concerned, home pregnancy test kits have to be approved by the FDA.

Conveinence of Home Kits

Actually, in the nearly 30 year history of the pregnancy test kit there have been very few incidences to cause concern. It has been one of the few devices to come along that truly makes our lives easier without causing more problems and costing more money than the initial cost.

Not only did we have to go to the doctor’s office for a pregnancy test before the pregnancy test kit came on the market, but we then had to wait 10-14 days for the results. Even the 2 hours we had to wait for the very first home pregnancy tests was minimal in comparison. Our lives are easier today because of the pregnancy test kit.

You can buy a home pregnancy test for early detection at any drugstore or most grocery stores without a prescription. Most of them will tell you that you can test any time of the day but it is better if you use the first urine of the day as it has higher concentrations of the pregnancy hormone, hCG. Some of the home pregnancy tests for early detection cannot detect the hormone at low levels. In fact, most of them can’t.

hCG Levels

Most of the home pregnancy tests will not advertise or even tell you what level of hCG their test can detect but you can do research online to find out which tests detect at which levels. The smallest level that the test can detect the hormone means the faster you can find out if you’re pregnant.

Some women, usually those on fertility drugs prefer a home pregnancy test for early detection that will only detect the pregnancy hormone at the higher levels because they may already have a certain level of hCG in their systems due to the fertility drugs. In this way, if they get a positive result, they will know it is because they are pregnant and not because of the levels already in their system.

That being said, any home pregnancy test for early detection that will give you the results in two or three minutes is still amazing compared to the way it used to be before the home pregnancy test was on the market. Then we had to go into the doctor’s office and after giving a urine sample we had to wait 10-14 days to get the results.

Give it Time

Today, women want to find out if they’re pregnant before they’ve even missed a period. The funny thing is that’s actually possible with some of the pregnancy tests for early detection that are on the market.

Still, if a woman gets a negative result before her period is even due, she’s not going to be very comforted until she gets another negative result several days later. And how can she be? Once you realize the technology behind the home pregnancy test you’ll know that a negative result doesn’t mean you’re not pregnant. It only means that the pregnancy hormone, hCG hasn’t been detected yet.

Of course, if you’re not pregnant the hCG won’t be detected at all and then you’ll realize you’re really not pregnant. However, the hormone isn’t even produced by the placenta until the embryo attaches itself to the uterine wall. Once that occurs then a negative result will be truth telling.

Try to be patient and wait until there has been time enough for the hormone to enter your system. If you jump the gun, you’re not going to know for sure if you’re not pregnant or if the hormone just hasn’t been detected yet.