About
Forty weeks is a long time to wait for someone you haven't met — and almost all of it happens where nobody can see it.
An app is a tab you close.
There are good pregnancy apps. We used them. But an app is a tab you close, and the day the baby arrives it quietly stops mattering — forty weeks of the most enormous thing that will ever happen to you, and nothing left you can hold.
FortyWeeks is the opposite of that. You don't open it. You tear it. And what's underneath is still there years later.
Cut, not printed.
Every page is laser-cut from cardstock — 120 of them in each calendar, stacked so that as the weeks come off, a sculpture appears underneath.
Cutting is slower than printing. It's also the only way the letters can be openings you hold up to the light instead of ink sitting on a surface. We make them in batches of 200, and each batch is checked and stacked before it's boxed.
A letter, not a chart.
Each of the forty weeks is written from published week-by-week guidance from ACOG, the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, the NHS and the CDC — then rewritten in plain, warm language so it reads like someone talking to you.
It's a keepsake, not medical advice. Every pregnancy is different, and yours belongs to you and your doctor or midwife.
Who's behind it
There are two of us — a married couple in Ontario, Canada.
We went through the forty weeks ourselves. We had the apps, the weekly notifications, the fruit comparisons. And when it was over, what we had left was a closed tab and a camera roll — nothing we could put on a shelf. So we made the thing we'd wanted.
We make them 200 at a time. When a batch is gone, the next one takes about four weeks.