If you're a mother to be, are planning on having a baby or know someone who is going to have a baby, a pregnancy due date calculator is definitely something you should look into. There are all kinds of different things that one can tell you, and they're just as fun as they are informative. You can find a lot of them online for free, or you can go to your local bookstore and pick one up. The kind of information you can get from a pregnancy due date calculator varies by which one you use, but when you plug in the first day of your last period many will tell you some basic stuff.

For example, more than one pregnancy due date calculator will tell you your conception date. It's something simple, but you'll need that later as you start taking gender quizzes and partaking in other mom to be entertainment. Also, you'll learn the time when your baby is at the greatest risk for birth defects. This is usually in the range of 5-10 weeks. Other useful tidbits will include when your baby's fetal organs have begun to form, when your baby's major organs have formed and the date at which the risk for miscarriage decreases.

A good pregnancy due date calculator will also tell you at point at which a prematurely born baby is most likely to survive. Finally, it will tell you when your actual due date is...ideally at around 40 weeks. You can also start to toy with things like the ancient Chinese lunar calendar, which people in the old days used to tell if the baby was going to be a boy or a girl. There are also different old wives tales that you can have fun with. Is your belly sticking straight out, or is it big and broad? That could be the difference between whether you should paint your nursery pink or blue, according to some.