17 Weeks Pregnant | Baby Starts to Hear the World

Baby is around the size of a pear, and the bones in their ears are hardening enough to start picking up sound.

What is happening this week

Your baby is roughly 13cm and about 150 grams. Fat is beginning to form under the skin, which will keep them warm after birth and start filling out the very thin frame they have had so far.

The bones of the inner ear are hardening, which means sound is beginning to reach them — mostly your heartbeat, your digestion, and the muffled version of your voice.

How you might be feeling

For most people this is the good stretch. Energy returns, nausea eases, and you are not yet big enough to be uncomfortable. If you have been waiting to feel like yourself again, week seventeen is often where it happens.

You may also feel the first flutters — often mistaken for wind, and easy to dismiss until you feel it again and realise what it was.

Worth writing down

The first movement is one of the details people most often wish they had recorded precisely. Not the week — the moment. Where you were, what you were doing, whether you told anyone straight away or kept it to yourself for a minute first.

Our Pregnancy Journal — Made With Love has a page for every week to forty, so there is somewhere for this to go. It pairs with Your First Years for afterwards, or take both together. If you are buying for someone else, the Pregnancy to Baby Keepsake Gift Set covers the whole journey.