The forty week journey from egg to embryo to fetus and finally bouncin’ baby can get to sounding real science-fiction-y when you think about the amazing amount of growth and cellular specialization that will emerge definitively from the ether in a relatively short time span. Sure, we’ve all heard terms like zygote and DNA before, but blastocyst? Lanugo? I am going to attempt to capture the progress of Momma and the pickle over these magical weeks in words and images, demonstrating the variety of wild junk that will perhaps dust off all the old reproductive vocabulary, and at the very least make you go, “Hmmmmm.”
The First Day (I am going to use conception to refer to the progress of the pregnancy, whereas doctors and the authors of baby books and people like that tend to confuse the whole thing by numbering the last day of the period before conception as the first day of the yet-to-come pregnancy… sort of like calling a farm a sandwich because it is making the crops that’ll one day become bread and such.) of the pregnancy there is a meeting of cells from mommy and pops. This happens in the fallopian tubes and is on the scale of a small speck. Take a look; it’s just random circles, is all.
By the Third Day cells have continued dividing and organizing and we can comfortably call the zygote a trouble maker. As it nears the uterus it has begun to send Mommy’s glandular and hormonal systems into a real whiz-bang dust up.
Between the First and Second Weeks we’ll see the head-of-a-pin-sized embryo find its home in the uterine wall and develop a lump of cells that will begin to flourish into the beginnings of all the complex and diverse organs and tissues that make up a human.
That’s not to say the embryo will be recognizably human. It will be working so hard at rapid growth and increasingly sub-divided specialization that there’ll be no time for aesthetic considerations. In a way it’s a lot like Einstein not giving a hoot about his appearance, and letting the visage of a Hoover-ville hobo disguise a prodigiously beautiful mind. Our little pickle is up to hard work at this point. The development of the amniotic components and the placenta as well as the deepening uterine attachment is serious business; “house-keeping” if you will. But imagine attempting house-keeping with no arms no legs… not even a head. Yeah.
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