Queen Elizabeth II - Development Through the Life Stages

Queen Elizabeth II- development through the life stages

Intro

The celebrity I will be doing is Queen Elizabeth II; she was born to Queen Elizabeth and George VI she turned 90 years old on April 21st. She was coronated in 1952. She is the Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. She is also queen of 12 other countries that have become independent since her accession. As the Queen her duties are keeping up to date with what is happening in Parliament and the governments of all the other Commonwealth countries, as well as current events from around the world. She is the longest reigning monarch and is married to the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, with whom she has 4 children, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward, Prince Charles and Princess Anne. She also has 8 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren.

Conception

The queen was conceived in the conventional way through sexual intercourse. Women usually produce an egg cell a month, roughly a month after their previous menstrual cycle (periods). The egg cell travels from the ovary to the uterus via the fallopian tube. If the woman partakes in sexual intercourse while the egg is still in the fallopian tube on the way to the uterus it has a high possibility of being fertilised. This is because during orgasm men can ejaculate millions of sperm, out of these millions it only takes one to fertilise the egg cell. Fertilisation is the joining of the sperm and egg cells’ genetic information to form a zygote. However only 50% of all fertile eggs develop into babies as many eggs are lost without women knowing that fertilisation had even taken place.

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Pregnancy

Pregnancy begins when the sperm penetrates the egg.  After around a day the fertilised egg begins to divide, after a couple of days these new cells make the size of the fertilised egg cell equivalent to a pinhead. The collection of cells is now referred to as an embryo and travels to the uterus lining where it embeds itself via a placenta. As soon as it is attached, hormones are released so the woman’s menstrual cycle is essentially stopped. By the 8th week of pregnancy, the embryo becomes foetus. The foetus has now grown to around 3-4cm and has a recognisable heartbeat and has the beginning of a mouth, ears, nose, mouth, arms and legs. As the next 7 months pass the foetus’s organs continue to develop. By 20 weeks it’s at half the length it will be at birth and at 32 weeks it weighs half as much as it would at birth.

0-3 years

Physically

9 months after conception, the Queen was born on April 21st 1926 at 2:40am, weighing 6lbs. At the time of birth, she was 3rd in line to the throne. The Queen as a new born baby wasn’t able to digest any food other than her mother’s breast milk or a substitute. The Queen also wasn’t able to hear everything as her brain wasn’t fully developed, but despite this she was able to distinguish the differences in taste and the way both her mum and nanny smelt. As a baby she was born with various temporary and primitive reflexes- in some babies these reflexes continue longer than necessary and this may be an indication of delayed development.