You are 12 weeks exactly

196 days until your due date

Your amazing baby can already open his mouth and yawn, hiccup, and swallow. Swallowing develops before sucking: your baby swallows amniotic fluid regularly, but the more complex sucking movements won't be seen until 18–20 weeks. Swallowing helps the gut develop. The fluid goes into the stomach, not the lungs, which are protected by the vocal cords and the higher pressure of their own fluid, and it will later be passed as urine once the kidneys start working.

From the stomach, the fluid moves into the small bowel. The intestinal walls are developing muscle layers, but these don't yet contract in a coordinated way to move fluid along, and the gut won't be fully organized until 20 weeks. Many digestive enzymes are starting to be released, but for now they stimulate development rather than absorb nutrients.

Your baby depends on a steady supply of glucose, which is stored as glycogen in the liver. This continues throughout pregnancy, and at birth your baby will have much larger glycogen reserves for its size than adults do.

Your blood glucose is controlled by insulin from your pancreas, but the placenta has little control over how much glucose it passes on. So if your glucose is very high, as in poorly controlled diabetes, the baby gets a lot of glucose. He keeps his own glucose level normal, but the extra insulin he releases leads to more fat and weight gain.