37 weeks pregnant: what is happening this week

48.6 cm, and the word that matters this week is term. ACOG and the NHS both treat 37 to 42 weeks as the term range, which means a birth from today onwards is not early. That is a five-week window, and it is the single most useful fact on this entire site for anyone fixated on a date: the due date is the midpoint of a distribution, not an appointment, and the distribution is more than a month wide. Around 95 per cent of babies are head down by now. Facial expressions are being practised - frowning, something like smiling. Vaginal discharge increases and Braxton Hicks continue. Nesting shows up for some people as an urgent conviction that the kitchen cupboards need reorganising, which is worth going along with rather than reasoning about. From here, the sensible posture is readiness without vigilance. The bag is packed, the route is known, the handover is sent. There is nothing else to do except carry on with ordinary life, which is both the hardest instruction of the pregnancy and the correct one.