Is Your Baby Awake?

The first fetal movements occur in the first trimester, but can only be seen on ultrasound and moms will not feel movement until sometime in the second trimester. Moms grown when the baby moves too much, then suddenly, a bit less movement and that's not good either! Physicians ask their moms to check fetal movement regularly once you are feeling the fetal movement. And you are tracking the baby moving, not just rolling movements from your body naturally jostling the baby around, or fluid shift movements. A baby that is moving markedly less is worrisome. Babies that move markedly more are not likely to be abnormal and that is not tracked very often. Exactly how much the baby should move is not really clear, although every obstetrician will tell you that less fetal movement is a sign to be reported.  There are at least four definitions of what normal fetal movement is. 1) feeling 10 movements in 12 hours, or some say 2)the ten movements should be over two hours when you are really trying to pay attention to your baby, ore 3)about 4 movements per hour, or they track per trimester noting $) your 10 movements in 25 minutes if you are in that mid portion of pregnancy, and by the time you get to term, the 10 movements only occur ever half hour to 35 minutes. Although you can feel your baby move, your obstetrician will have to resort to hooking you up to the fetal monitor. On the monitor whether at rest or when you go in for labor and they put a fetal monitor on your abdomen the best sign that your fetus is moving is the heart rate going up. In fact when you feel the baby move, the heart rate should go up by at least 15 beats per minute extra and stay that way for at least 15 seconds. When The baby isn't moving, we have to get the baby to wake up to be able to see if that heart rate change is responding normally. One way to wake up the fetus is to put a noise on the mom's tummy. This can be done with a tool called an artificial larynx. The noise is put on the pregnant abdomen for a second or two, even up to three, and up to three times in a row, to try to wake the baby It usually works pretty instantly to wake up a developing fetus with the noise maker! Gently rubbing the baby's back through the abdomen or feeding the baby some sugar works too, but these techniques work more slowly to wake the babies. Babies do not technically run out of room to move at all, so they should be able to move fairly vigorously the whole  as we already discussed,
although the types of movements do change and may go from a wide ranging kick to more of a rolling movement.