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Fetal movement refers to motion of a fetus caused by its own muscle activity. It is usually felt around the 17th - 20th week from the last menstual period. Cyclic patterns of activity/sleep are thought to take place with “quiet” sleep cycles lasting from 10 to 60 minutes. Daily number of movements varie from 50 to 1000 with maximum active period near the 32nd week of pregnancy.
The first time when I felt my baby’s movement was at the 17th week of gestation. Since then, I began to notice a regular pattern of her activities everyday. To me, fetal movement is the only way for my baby to communciate with me at this time, telling me what she wants, likes, or dislikes.
I try to understand her movements and identify the message she presents to me and do my best to satisfy her needs.
Message 1: I am hungry.
I have noticed an increase of baby’s daily movements around 5am-6am, 10am-11am, and 3pm-4pm. At first, I didn’t understand why she moved more frequently during this period of time. Little by little, I noticed that I always felt hungry myself half an hour after baby began moving.
Her movements, are just like tickeling or fluttering at first. If I don’t take any actions, she starts to knock, swirl, and kick. If I still don’t do anything, she then will roll, punch and play acrobactics. Also at the same time, I feel very hungry myself.
M explained this way: the baby is connected with my digestive system, therefore she feels earlier than me the fall of maternal blood glucose levels, which results in the sense of hungry.
This explanation does make sense!
Right now, as soon as I feel her first activities, I begin to eat something immediately. Meanwhile, the timing of her movements is advanced to around 4:30am, 9:30am and 2:30pm everyday, with her growing need of more energy and nutrition.
If the baby has continuous supply of nutrition during the day, is she still going to move and send message to me? One day, I suddenly had such an interesting question.
Let’s find it out!
The next day, I ate almost continuously, with all kinds of light meals (chicken dumpling, rice noodle, banana, yogurt, vegetable soup, and etc). The baby kept quiet for a whole day, with only rare motions close to the noon.
So it did prove my hypothesis was right!
But soon other question marks popped up in my mind: is the baby ok? Why she is this quiet? Is she still alive…?
I let out a long breath when next morning, around 5am, baby’s familiar kicking woke me up, and without any complaining and even with some relief, I went down to the kitchen and began my first meal in a day…
Related posts:
Understanding fetal movements, part 2
Understanding fetal movements, part 3
Understanding fetal movements, part 4
