What a brainy baby!

So, the good news this week: your baby has fingers and toes. True, they look more like paddles with membranes than those cute fingers that you will kiss and tickle, but time will fix everything. Although shovel hands would be very useful in life — it would be convenient to dig sand in a sandbox or to rake snow in winter with them ?

The arms and legs grow, lengthen and begin to look like human ones: the embryo already has shoulders, elbows, knees, and feet. True, so far the baby is still called an embryo and still wags its tail (do not be alarmed, in a couple of weeks it will stop doing this). But it has doubled its height since last week (and 10,000 times since conception!!!) and now resembles a blueberry in size.

If you could now look at your child, you would notice folds of the eyelids, partially covering the eyes (which have already acquired color, by the way), a tiny tip of the nose and thin veins under the tender skin. The appendix, liver, and pancreas are formed already and begin to work.

We are glad to present you your new best friends for the coming months: the umbilical cord and the mucus plug (it finally corked the cervix). They are simply irreplaceable, because one provides your baby with oxygen and nutrition, and the other protects it from infections.

The main thing: your little one grows wiser! Both hemispheres of its brain grow, 100 new brain cells appear in a minute! So it will soon begin some algebra calculations right in your belly! And at the other “end” of the baby’s body, kidneys have already formed and are ready to begin recycling. Soon your embryo will begin to produce urine as a big boy or girl. Fortunately, no diapers are needed.

Measuring baby:
Height (crown-to-rump) 0.31 in. (0.8 cm)