Your second trimester at a glance

The second trimester — weeks 14 to 27 — is the one with the good PR, and honestly, it mostly earns it. Nausea usually lifts, energy comes back, the bump finally looks like a bump rather than a big lunch, and somewhere in the middle of it you’ll feel your baby move for the first time. Here’s the overview.

Your baby spends these weeks growing from about the size of a lemon to a small cabbage — developing hearing (they can hear your voice from around week 16 and recognise it by the end), a sense of taste, sleep and wake cycles, and enough coordination to kick, roll and hiccup. By week 24 they reach the milestone doctors call viability, and their chances improve with every week that follows.

Movements usually announce themselves between weeks 16 and 22 — later and fainter if it’s your first baby or your placenta is at the front. Early on it’s flutters and bubbles that are easy to second-guess; by the end of the trimester it’s unmistakable kicks with a daily rhythm. That rhythm becomes your baby’s signature — worth getting to know, because from 28 weeks you’ll be asked to keep an eye on it.

The main event on the calendar is the morphology (anatomy) scan around 20 weeks — the long, detailed ultrasound that checks your baby head to toe, looks at the placenta’s position, and can (if you want!) reveal the sex. Later in the trimester, usually between 24 and 28 weeks, comes the glucose test for gestational diabetes, plus routine bloods. Appointments are otherwise spaced out — roughly monthly — which after the intensity of early pregnancy can feel almost suspiciously quiet.

Your body is doing quieter renovations of its own. Welcome back appetite; welcome also, possibly, to round ligament twinges as things stretch, backache as your centre of gravity shifts, a blocked nose, warmer skin, and — later on — heartburn and the first Braxton Hicks practice tightenings. From around mid-trimester it’s best to sleep on your side rather than flat on your back; a pillow between the knees converts most people to the idea quickly.

This is also the doing trimester. If pregnancy has admin, now is its window: booking antenatal classes (they fill up), thinking about your parental leave dates and telling work, starting the baby-gear list, and travelling if you fancy it — these weeks are the sweet spot for a trip. None of it is urgent; all of it is easier now than at 36 weeks.

Mood-wise, many people feel most like themselves in these weeks, but “supposed to be glowing” can weigh on the ones who don’t — if pregnancy still feels hard or flat, that’s worth a conversation with your midwife, not a secret to keep. And any bleeding, fluid loss, regular painful tightenings, or a gut feeling that something’s off is always worth a call to your maternity unit, whatever week it is.

Enjoy this stretch if it’s being kind to you — bank some sleep, take the trip, let people make a fuss. The third trimester has its own charms, but it will ask more of you; this is the part of pregnancy built for savouring.