Every mom-to-be wants a pregnancy that’s healthy and progresses normally throughout the nine months, but it doesn’t happen by chance. While a lot of what happens during a pregnancy is out of the mom’s control, there is still a lot that can be monitored to make sure everything is progressing as it should. If you want to feel more in control of your pregnancy, you’ve come to the right place.

How Far Along Are You?

When you go to your doctor appointments after finding out you’re pregnant, one of the things that they’ll do is measure your tummy in order to estimate the baby’s size, and the baby’s size will depend on the exact week of pregnancy.

A typical pregnancy lasts 40 weeks, and the way your due date is determined is based on the date of your last menstrual period, or LMP. If your pregnancy hasn’t been confirmed by a doctor, you can use an online pregnancy due date calculator to determine when the baby is due to enter the world.

Typically, women ovulate about two weeks after their last period, and since you can only get pregnant when you’re ovulating, a pregnancy is actually only 38 weeks long. In essence, you aren’t even pregnant the first two weeks of your pregnancy because the calculators always count from the last menstrual period and not when you were ovulating, since that date is difficult to determine.

Is it Possible to Determine When You Conceived?

Many women know exactly when they conceived, but this isn’t true for everyone. If you’re trying to get pregnant, you might be using one of those over-the-counter ovulation predictor kits, which tells you when you’re ovulating. Keep in mind that the day you have sex is not necessarily the day that you got pregnant. Sperm can live in the body for up to five days, so determining the exact day you got pregnant can be a challenge.

Still, if you use an online conception date calculator, you’ll likely get closer to the exact date of conception. These calculators are easy to find and easy to use. Let’s face it -- babies don’t always arrive on their due dates anyway, but if you’re using one of these calculators, you likely won’t be off by more than just a few days to a week. If you use a calculator to determine how far along you are and when you conceived, it helps a lot.

What If You Got Pregnant Through IVF?

In-vitro fertilization, or IVF, is a way to help couples have a baby when they are having trouble conceiving the regular way. It involves mixing the sperm and egg in a lab and then implanting it into the mom-to-be. IVF is very successful and is a last resort for many couples, and if this is what you used to get pregnant, an IVF due date calculator -- again, which can be found online -- is the easiest way to tell when your baby is due.

If you’re an IVF patient, you’ll need to know your IVF transfer date, which is easy to learn. Here’s an easy way to do this:

• For a Day 5 embryo transfer, count 261 days from that transfer date
• For a Day 3 embryo transfer, count 263 days from that transfer date

When you go through IVF, everything is documented in your medical records well, so learning when your transfer date is never difficult. If you cannot remember the date on your own, call the office of the clinic where you got the procedure done and they can give it to you. Once you know that, these online IVF calculators are very effective.

Your Doctor Has Methods of Keeping Track of Everything

Right from the start, you’ll want to make sure you know when your baby is due and learn what you need to do to keep the pregnancy healthy the entire nine months. The doctor will also look at how much weight you’ve gained at each appointment, so now is definitely not the time to diet. Once again, if you’re monitoring everything, another type of calculator, the pregnancy weight gain calculator, is a good one to use.

In most cases, the amount of weight you’ll need to gain will vary depending on your weight before you got pregnant. A healthy weight gain is 11 to 40 pounds, but you should talk to your doctor and go by that recommendation if you’re unsure. Women who are underweight at the start of their pregnancy will usually be asked to gain the most weight so that your BMI is always within a healthy range.

OB-GYNs use a variety of methods to make sure that your pregnancy is progressing normally, including ultrasounds, prenatal tests, and of course, regular visits to the doctor that are usually scheduled every four weeks until late in the third trimester, when they are usually scheduled more frequently. If you keep these visits and listen to your doctor, it’s much easier to keep an eye on everything so that you can have a healthy baby in the end.

Conclusion

Making sure that your pregnancy is progressing normally is essential and usually starts with determining how far along you are. This is a lot easier if you use calculators to determine when you conceived or when your last menstrual period was. The good news is, most of the calculators can be found online and are free and easy to use. If you have any questions about the information that you discover when using a calculator, a visit to your doctor is recommended.