Mother Is Pregnant With Twins But As Father Grabs The Camera They Leave Him Speechless

Feb 10, 2021 by apost team

In 2013, a father caught some amazing footage of his pregnant wife's baby bump and uploaded it to Youtube. The couple, who were expecting twins that year, likely knew that babies are active in the womb. But very few people, as the incredulous comments section suggests, expected what this pair of unborn and energetic twins was capable of.

Babies start moving in the womb long before an expectant mother can feel it. They stretch, flip over and wiggle their developing limbs as early as the eighth week of gestation.

According to Today's Parent, the first noticeable fetal movements are called "quickening." Quickening often feels like popcorn popping, muscles twitching or gas moving about in the stomach.

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First-time moms usually notice quickening anywhere from the 16th to the 22nd week of gestation. If you've already delivered a baby, you might notice quickening as early as 12 weeks into your pregnancy. Your abdominal wall relaxes earlier if you've been pregnant before. This allows you to feel fetal movement sooner than first-time mothers.

As a baby grows, their kicks become more noticeable. By 28 weeks, your family and friends will be able to feel the baby kick. Babies at this stage of development should move at least six times an hour.

Eventually, babies start to run out of space in the womb. They move less, but the movements they make are more dramatic. It's not uncommon to see the outline of an arm or foot when the baby stretches.

If single babies run out of space, things must be especially tight for twins. The mom in the video below is lucky she was lying on her side when her twins started moving. These powerful "kicks" might have been enough to make her lose her balance!

As viewers will see in the video, not only is this woman’s belly massive, but you can also clearly see the twins moving around inside the womb. At around the 30-second mark, for example, you can see the baby’s foot as they kick against their mother’s stomach. 

Since the video was uploaded to YouTube back in 2013, it has accumulated more than 14 million views and nearly 700 comments. Many of the comments are surprised both by the size of the mother’s belly and how clearly you can see the babies’ movements. Others noted that the experience looked painful.

“...you can actually see the shape of both the babies feet kicking right out at the womb wall in almost perfect detail! That's mind blowing, scary but awesome!” one user wrote.

“Wow 😳  I have the most up right respect for you lady,” Janae Mcclair added in a popular comment that the original uploader hearted. “This is beautiful but gosh I've never seen motherhood look so ... big.”

According to Motherly, which references a journal article authored by researchers at Imperial College London, fetal movements — such as the kicking we see in the video — can be quite strong and painful. Utilizing medical imaging technology, the Imperial College team modeled a fetus’ kicks to figure out how strong the movements generally are. Their findings determined that 20-week-old fetuses kick with up to 6.5 lbs of force, 30-week-old fetuses with 10.5 lbs of force and 35-week-old fetuses with 3.8 lbs of force. Although fetuses at 35 weeks tend to kick with less force, this doesn’t indicate that the baby is getting weaker; rather, the baby moves with less force simply because it has run out of space by this point. To put these numbers into perspective, know that Holly Holm, a professional MMA fighter, can deliver a knockout kick at 50 pounds of force, which is about ten times stronger than a 30-week-old fetus. Still, ⅕ the force of a knockout kick from the inside of someone’s body sounds pretty painful.

In the study, the researchers explain that these movements are quite important for a fetus’ development.

“Mechanical forces generated by fetal kicks and movements result in stimulation of the fetal skeleton in the form of stress and strain,” the researchers write in their abstract. “This stimulation is known to be critical for prenatal musculoskeletal development; indeed, abnormal or absent movements have been implicated in multiple congenital disorders.”

Speaking to LiveScience in 2018, bioengineer Niamh Nowlan, who worked on the aforementioned study, explained that many of the movements babies make in the womb, especially early on in the pregnancy, are “purely reflex,” meaning that the fetus isn’t exactly in control of its movements. Later on, however, it’s “likely the brain is in control of how much and when the baby moves,” according to Nowlan.

Nowlan also echoed the study’s findings, telling LiveScience that regardless of whether the movements are conscious or not, a fetus “needs to move (in the womb) to be healthy after birth, particularly for their bones and joints.”

Because fetal movements are so important, entrepreneurs have even developed an app, Kicks Count, to track a baby’s movements in the womb. According to the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, which has promoted the app, the tool helps mothers to track their baby’s movements in order to determine whether they are normal or not.

"I felt so strongly that this would work, that this would help,” explains the app’s CEO, Elizabeth Hutton, on the company’s website. “The UK has one of the worst stillbirth rates in the developed world, a third of which occur after 37 weeks when the baby is considered full term.”

“Kicks counts had a very simple message,” she continues. “Report any change in your (baby’s) movements immediately. In Norway, this simple message had helped reduce their stillbirth rate by 50%. All we needed to do was make every single pregnant woman aware of Kicks Count."

By the looks of the video below, it seems that this viral mom’s children are quite healthy as far as fetal movements are concerned. With that said, the video is an important reminder that a baby’s movements are more than just fascinating for parents. As the researchers at Imperial College London point out, they also offer important clues to a baby’s health.

What did you think of this video? Have you ever seen anything like this before? Let us know in the comments and be sure to pass this video along to your friends and loved ones – everyone should see this!