Your baby's major organs begin to develop around the third week of pregnancy, giving you a tiny cushion. While it is best to discontinue drinking and other behaviors known to cause potential harm to your baby before even attempting to get pregnant, sometimes it doesn't work that way.

There is some preliminary research that says even a few drinks this early may cause fetal cell death. This may or may not mean trouble for the baby or pregnancy.

One piece of good news is that early pregnancy tests are now more sensitive. This means that you can discover your pregnancy sooner and take corrective measures to stop unhealthy behaviors like drinking and smoking. This gives your baby the best chance at a healthy start.

Be sure to be honest with your doctor or midwife at your prenatal visits. Explain to them what happened before you knew you were pregnant. They will then have a chance to do extra testing if called for, reassure you or advise you in helping to adopt a healthy lifestyle. Don't be embarrassed or worried - they have experience dealing with this on a daily basis.

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Advantages to Telling Early

• Lots of support early in pregnancy
• Able to share your good news and excitement
• Earlier offers of physical help
• More advice from others about practitioners
• Help with early decisions
• If you miscarry, you will have support from everyone

Disadvantages to Telling Early

• Too much advice
• Good news travels fast, you may not be the first to tell someone
• If you miscarry everyone knew you were pregnant

Advantages to Waiting to Tell

• Time to digest the news
• Make decisions without input of others
• If you miscarry you don't have to retract the pregnancy announcement

Disadvantages to Waiting to Tell

• No help/support from others
• If you miscarry everyone wonders why you are sad, and you have to backtrack your explanation

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Beyond the obvious — Mommy and Daddy are around a lot and babies are drawn to them — languages in many cultures have apparently made the task easy by creating words for mothers and fathers that feature patterns of repeating sounds, a new study suggests.

To arrive at this finding, brain scans were made of 22 newborns (age 2 days to 3 days) while they listened to recordings of made-up words. They heard words that end in repeating syllables, such as "mubaba" and "penana," as well as words without them, such as "mubage" and "penaku."

This suggests "mama" and "dada" (or "papa") are well-chosen words to teach a baby, and it also indicates that the ability to more easily recognize these sorts of repetitive sounds is hard-wired in the human brain.

The research, led by University of British Columbia post-doctoral fellow Judit Gervain, was published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It's probably no coincidence that many languages around the world have repetitious syllables in their 'child words,'" Gervain said, citing "papa" in Italian and "tata" (grandpa) in Hungarian as examples.

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