Hey guys! I haven't posted much lately. All kinds of exciting stuff has been happening and I have a ton of projects to tell you about, but finishing off my daughter's gestation has taken all the energy I have lately. As in I consider it a major accomplishment if I can make dinner AND walk the dogs before collapsing on the couch after work.
I reached "full term" last week, which I'm pretty sure is a somewhat arbitrary identification of when most medical professionals consider a fetus to be done enough as long as it's developing at roughly the average rate. I found some data online about the timing of spontaneous labor by weeks of gestation a week or two ago. They had the raw data for the number of woman who spontaneously went into labor during each week of gestation from 35 to 43. I felt compelled to play with the numbers in excel and figure out what the chances of going into labor were for each week.
The absolute line is the percent who went into labor in each week. The relative line is the percent women who went into labor of those who hadn't already (i.e. the percent of women who were still pregnant at the beginning of the week). Based on their admittedly small sample there is only about a 15% chance I will this week so don't get too anxious. However, my husband reminds me that 15% means it happened 15% of the time so it's not all that unlikely.
Another fun fact: the average length of gestation for someone my age in the study was 279 days.
Oh, and I found this infographic on animal gestation lengths on
LiveScience.com.
Three notes of interest (to me at least):
1. I'm pretty sure the term "gestation" only applies to viviparous animals (i.e. not chickens).
2. Dogs and cats have the same average gestation length?! Go figure.
3. I'm curious about whether their size comparison is supposed to reflect the size of a newborn or adult animal. Newborn would make a lot more sense in the context, but whatever.
