We do have something like water reservoirs inside our body! Let’s learn five beautiful bladder facts for kids.
Your bladder is a triangle-shaped, hollow organ which is located in the lower belly. It is held in place by ligaments that are attached to other organs and the pelvic bones. Ligaments are tough bands of tissue. The bladder’s main purpose is to store your urine. The bladder holds your urine inside until it is ready to leave the body. When you need to go to the bathroom, your bladder wall contracts or deflates which allows the urine to flow out of your body.
As your bladder fills up it expands to hold more liquid. The average sized bladder can store up to 2 cups of urine for 2 to 5 hours. This is roughly 400 millilitres of liquid. Your bladder wall has wrinkles in its inner lining, which are known as rugae. It is these wrinkles that help your bladder to expand.
When the bladder is empty, it is roughly the size of a pear. You may notice that your stomach sometimes bloats out when you need to pee, this is because your bladder is located within your abdomen.
Your kidneys are a pair of organs that are located below your ribs. They work with the bladder to remove waste from your body. The kidneys act as filters which actually make urine. The urine the kidneys make is then passed through the ureters to reach the bladder. Your urine then leaves the bladder through a tube called the urethra. A woman’s urethra is shorter than a man’s urethra.
When your bladder is eventually full, nerve endings in the bladder wall send a message to the brain that you need to pee. If these nerves didn’t tell our bladder to empty we wouldn’t know when our bladder was full. Can you imagine if we had to remind ourselves to pee a couple of times a day.
It takes approximately nine to ten hours for your body to make two cups of urine. This means that if you drink a litre of water, it won’t be made into urine for up to 10 hours. While your bladder can hold urine for a long time it is important that you don’t hold in your urine for too long. Holding in urine too long can cause bladder problems. If you hold in your bladder for a long period of time it will not be able to empty as well. On average you should go to the bathroom four to eight times a day.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about the urinary bladder as much as we loved teaching you about them. Now that you know how majestic this system in human body is, you can move on to learn about other ones like: Kidneys, Urinary System, Pancreas and Bones.
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