Pregnancy Week Tracker

Forty cards, six to a page

Each week gets a card of its own. A space for the size comparison, room for symptoms, a line for appointments, notes underneath.

Print all forty and you have a seven-page journal. Or set a starting week and a count, and print only the stretch ahead of you — which is what most people do, since nobody arrives at this page in week one.

Why weeks and not months

Because weeks are how pregnancy is counted, by midwives and by everyone else. A month is also too coarse a unit for a stretch of life in which things change fortnightly.

Weeks are dated from the first day of your last period, not from conception, which puts you at roughly "two weeks pregnant" before there is anything there at all. It confuses everyone the first time. The convention exists because the last period is a date you know and conception generally is not.

The symptoms space

Write things down as they happen. Not as you remember them a fortnight later.

Midwife and consultant appointments are short, and the questions are specific. When did that start? How often? Has it changed? A journal answers all three, and memory in a week where you have not slept properly does not.

It is also where you notice patterns worth mentioning — nausea that started tracking with a particular time of day, headaches that arrived together, swelling that came on suddenly. That last one, along with severe headache or visual disturbance, is worth ringing your midwife about the same day rather than saving for the next appointment.

Appointments

The line on each card is for the date and what it was for. Twelve-week scan, twenty-week scan, glucose test, the whooping cough vaccination, midwife checks, whatever your care team schedules — and the schedule varies by country and by how the pregnancy is going.

Keeping them on the same sheet as the symptoms means you arrive with both halves of the picture.

Afterwards

Most people keep it. Forty weeks of your own handwriting is a record nothing replaces, and it is the thing you will actually read again in ten years, which is not true of an app.

Print on decent paper if that appeals. Punch it and put it in a folder with the scan photographs.

What it is not

A journal, not medical guidance. It records what happens; it does not tell you what is normal, and it is no substitute for your midwife, GP or obstetrician. If something worries you, call them — that is what the number is for, and nobody has ever been thought a nuisance for using it.