Pregnancy Journal Prompts by Trimester

The enemy of every pregnancy journal is the blank page. “Write about your pregnancy” is a paralyzing instruction; “write down who knew first” takes ninety seconds. So here are prompts that work like small doors, sorted by trimester, none requiring more than five minutes. Date every entry with the week you’re in, counted from your due date; the pregnancy week calculator will tell you the week whenever you’ve lost the thread.

First trimester: the secret era

Early pregnancy is the only stretch of this whole story that happens in private, which makes it the easiest to lose. Prompts: What were you doing when you found out, and what was the first thing you said? Who knew first, and why them? What do you call the baby right now, and who coined it? What’s the first thing anyone bought? What are you not ready to say out loud yet? Write that last one anyway; you’re the only reader for now.

Second trimester: the telling era

The middle months are when the story goes public and starts collecting other people. Prompts: How did you announce, and whose reaction surprised you? Where were you the first time you felt movement, and what did it remind you of? What’s on the names list as of today, including the ones you’ve already crossed off and who vetoed them? What does the future nursery look like right now, before anything changes? What food has become weirdly important? (Somewhere in here you’ll also be told your baby is the size of a fruit; we’ve explained where those comparisons come from, and the week’s fruit makes a fine journal entry on a slow week.)

Third trimester: the waiting era

The last stretch is a study in anticipation, and anticipation is very writable. Prompts: What’s in the hospital bag, listed like a still life? What does everyone in the family predict, name, date, hair, temperament? What are you doing to make the time pass? What does “ready” look like at your house, and what still isn’t? Take one photo of the two of you (or the three of you, or the dog) on an ordinary evening, and caption it with what you were watching. If writing stalls, interview each other instead: ask your partner the same five questions once a month and jot the answers. Dialogue is easier to produce than prose, and funnier to reread.

And save one prompt for the very end, to be answered in the last week or two: what do you already know about this person? Every family has hunches by then, built from kicks and hiccups and a stubborn refusal to be comfortable in any position after nine. Write the hunches down. Reading them back later, against the actual child, is one of the great pleasures the journal will ever deliver, whether the guesses were eerily right or gloriously wrong.

Keep the words with the pictures

A journal entry and a bump photo from the same week belong together, and keeping them in separate apps is how one of them gets lost. A pregnancy photo journal keeps both on the week they happened, labeled and in order, so the record builds itself while you’re busy living it. And one boundary: these prompts are memory keeping, not medical tracking. Questions about how the pregnancy is going belong to your doctor or midwife; the journal’s only job is making sure the good parts don’t evaporate.

One line a week is the whole practice. It reads like nothing now, and like everything in ten years.