One of the most entertaining add-ons to any baby prediction pool is the day-of-week category. When you ask guests to guess what day of the week baby will be born, you unlock a flood of opinions, superstitions, and folk wisdom that the standard date category doesn't capture.
Here's why it works so well — and how to get the most out of it.
Why day of week creates more engagement
Predicting an exact birth date is hard. Predicting a day of the week is approachable. Everyone has an opinion.
Some guests will look at the due date and calculate what day it falls on. Others will reason about hospital scheduling — "They'll induce on a Tuesday to have the full week team available." Others go pure gut: "Always a Sunday for that family." The category invites conversation in a way that pounds-and-ounces doesn't.
In pools that have enabled day of week, it's consistently one of the categories that sparks the most pre-results discussion in group chats.
The folk wisdom behind the guesses
People approach this category from several angles:
**The due-date anchor**: Most first-time guessers look at what day the due date falls on and pick that or the day before or after.
**The induction theory**: Scheduled inductions tend to happen mid-week (Tuesday through Thursday) in most hospitals, since full surgical teams are typically staffed those days. Guests who know this often favor Wednesday or Thursday.
**The labor-starting-at-night theory**: A popular belief holds that labor often starts late at night, meaning baby arrives in the early morning hours — possibly crossing into the next day.
**The weekend theory**: Natural labors seem (anecdotally) more common over weekends, possibly because lower stress away from work schedules makes the body more ready.
None of these are scientifically validated, but they generate great debate.
How scoring works
Baby Bids scores the day-of-week category as a binary: exact match scores the full category points. Unlike date or weight, there's no partial credit — you either nail the day or you don't.
This makes it a high-risk, high-reward category. Guests who get it right usually jump several spots in the standings.
When to enable it
Day of week works best when:
You can enable or disable day of week when you create your pool, or anytime before the first entry is submitted.
Pairing it with time of day
If you enable day of week, consider also enabling **time of day** — the category that asks whether baby will arrive in the morning, afternoon, evening, or night. Together these two categories add a full arrival-window dimension to the game without making the entry form much longer.
Guests who guess the same date but pick different day-and-time combinations create a spread that keeps scoring interesting all the way to the final reveal.
Live standings make it more fun
Once entries are in, share your pool's live standings link with participants. They can see what day everyone picked, how the crowd consensus compares to their guess, and exactly how separated they are from first place in the standings.
The anticipation of watching the days tick by — "It's already Thursday, only Friday and Saturday left for anyone who picked the weekend!" — turns a passive wait into an active experience.
Quick tips
Happy guessing!