My wife is in her 5th month of pregnancy and reports that if she doesn’t eat every two hours, our son-in-the-making begins kicking, elbowing and generally making an active protest until she gets some food in her. I don’t doubt her physical experience but question the mechanics of it.
Am I wrong in thinking that the baby is getting its nutrition on a constant basis directly into its body via the umbilical cord? Is its stomach doing anything right now? When my wife eats, the baby obviously isn’t getting chunks of burger or wads of cottage cheese shot into it. Does the baby have any reason to personally feel hungry or is he just reacting perhaps to my wife’s stomach rumbling or other signals within her own system that indicate hunger?
The baby isn’t fed through it’s stomach yet, so surely it can’t feel hunger. It just gets a stream of nutrients through the cord, so if you are hungry, your baby will just be absorbing the nutrients from your bloodstream sort of like a leech.
We feel hungry because of the state of our blood chemistry as well as the contents of our stomach, though, right? The baby could be experiencing low blood sugar and feeling crabby over it.
I would think that the baby does, in fact experience blood sugar rises and drops. It was certainly true that Celtling woke up and got active about 20-30 minutes after a cup of coffee!
For most people, hunger is really only barely connected to stomach fullness. We don’t experience a reduction in hunger until the first few bites of food begin to be absorbed.
Also, pregnant women do just need to eat more often, so if you’re giving her crap about that, cut it out! (And if not, please ignore the preceding! LOL!)
Celt made me think of something sorta related and I don’t feel it’s worth its own thread: Do unborn babies have cycles of sleep and wakefulness? I guess I’ve always kinda thought of them as being comatose and unconscious until they’re born. The idea of a conscious being inside of a person, capable of seeing what’s going on in there and stuff, creeps me out a little.
Babies definitely respond to increases in mom’s blood sugar. With both my pregnancies I had to do weekly non-stress tests (you strap on the fetal monitor and wait for fetal movement and track the fetus’ heart rate as the movement occurs. The heart rate should not drop too much). You needed 10 movements to complete a test. My daughter was so sleepy that she didn’t move very much, so they plied me with juice and cookies to get her moving. It always worked.
ETA: Melon: my kids not only had periods of wakefulness and quiet time, but they each had their own particular activity levels. My son was in constant motion in utero (and rarely slept as a baby) and my daughter was quiet (and slept 4-6 hours a shot right from birth!).
Haha… no, no flack from me about her diet. I’m just wondering what triggers the reaction from the kid.
She says that if it’s been about two hours and she eats something (say, a piece of fruit) then the baby stays relatively passive. If she neglects to eat something, he gets progressively more aggressive in his activity. My guess was chemical or physical cues within her body that would agitate him but that’s just a WAG.
Absolutely. What’s worse is that as pregnancy progresses and they can’t move around much, their “awake” cycle moves to when mom is prone and still…in other words, at night. This effectively trains the little buggers to be nocturnal for the first few weeks!
I don’t think the baby has any advantage at extracting nutrition from the mother’s blood over the mother herself. If she’s feeling low blood sugar, it will too.
I’m at six months, and my kid definitely seems to react to food, although more or less in the opposite way your wife describes. As IvoryTowerDenizen said, mine is significantly more active right after I eat something. I assumed it was because he can taste the flavor of what I’m eating in the amniotic fluid. Although lately, it seems he’s running around almost constantly, so it’s harder to tell.
But I don’t see why babies couldn’t also feel hunger. While it’s true they’re not fed through their stomachs, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re receiving nutrients in a constant, steady flow. It may well be that if the mom hasn’t eaten in a while, there aren’t as many nutrients in the bloodstream passing to the baby, and so the baby does get hungry. But IANAD, and I have no real idea one way or the other; it just seems plausible.
Oh, and AClockworkMelon, be afraid. Be very afraid. Babies can not only taste the amniotic fluid, but can also see and hear (and will sometimes react to bright lights or loud sounds). And they not only sleep - they dream. I’d love to know what they could possibly be dreaming about.
My daughter tried to grab the amniocentesis needle! We watched it on the ultrasound. The doc had to stick me twice, 'cause he reflexively yanked it away from her!
I guess I just assumed there was always stuff there but when you get hungry it just means eat more to add to the overall level of food for mom and baby…Or not.
ClockworkMelon, it kind of skeeves me, too. The idea of it being awake and thinking, “Feed me” creeps me out so bad. I’m never getting pregnant. Well, that and not wanting to get stitches on my vagina.
I really love to listen to loud music in the car. I figured out I needed to turn it down at about 5-6 months, when Celtling was kicking along with the beat.
Indeed, they are constantly swallowing it. Bits of it stay behind and build up in the intestines, so that the newborn baby often poops before it has actually fed outside the womb.
Yeah. We once had to see a birthing video in school (not for health–one student did a presentation on something she’d been working on outside of school). It was creepy. I think they actually showed an episiotomy and that was when I knew birthin’ babies (either doing it or helping out) wasn’t for me. Ew, ew, ew!
As I mentioned in my “listen to me blather on about pregnancy” thread, I actually *wish *it seemed weirder to me than it does. I was really looking forward to pregnancy being all sci-fi, but it’s disappointingly mundane. I keep trying to remind myself how utterly bizarre it is that there’s a fully sentient proto-person *inside *me (one who may even get hungry :)), with a mind of its own, but I’m just inured to it now. To me, it’s no creepier than carrying around a baby in my arms all the time. Oh well. At least it’s more convenient.
But yeah… stiches in the poon. That’s going to be all kinds of fun.
