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Track your pregnancy day by day.

It's a moment most expectant mothers look forward to and dread all at the same time. They look forward to it because it signals the end of pregnancy and, in most cases, the onset of labor and delivery of the baby they've been dreaming of for nine months. They dread it because it has the potential to happen in a less-than-desirable place, where easy cleanup may not be a possibility. What are we talking about? When your water breaks.

During the final weeks of pregnancy, some women sleep on top of towels so their sheets won't be stained when their amniotic fluid or "bag of waters" breaks. Others fearfully move through their final days praying they won't be somewhere (i.e. work, grocery store, mall) where the action of their water breaking would leave behind an embarrassing mess.

We've all seen movies where such things happen to pregnant characters, such as Drew Barrymore's amniotic fluid gushing onto the floor in Riding in Cars with Boys or Kirstie Alley's water breaking on the streets of New York in Look Who's Talking, so who wouldn't picture that as the way most women's bag of waters break?

Interestingly enough, it usually doesn't happen that way for most women. In fact, both Dr. Edward J. Lazarus, an OB/GYN who works with the UT Medical Group in Tennessee, and Dr. Adelaide G. Nardone, medical advisor to Lansinoh Laboratories, say that only between 8 and 10 percent of their patients experience their water breaking at term. The majority of the time expectant moms actually have their physicians break their waters for them, after labor has already begun. Learn more by reading the article, A Sudden Gush: What Happens When Your Water Breaks?

Site Guest Brenda shares her water breaking moment:

"I woke up lying in a puddle. The sheets around me were soaked. I woke up my husband and told him I had peed all over myself. He was the one who had to tell me that my water had broken."