Annoying Your Unborn Child

We all want our kids to be healthy, happy, and smart. We play music for them in the womb. We sing to them (or try to), we talk to them as if they are already outside in our world. We read books to them.

All this is well and good to get those new synapses firing, and to try to get your baby to be as intelligent and talented as he or she can be. However, I'm finding that it's more fun to annoy my child in an effort to accomplish the same thing as talking to her in two languages for an hour a day, or whatever is the latest prenatal stimulation fad. My theory is, if she's in there kicking me all day, and she can hear and feel me, as well as detect light, there are tons of ways to pay her back and, at the same time, develop as many brain cells as possible before she makes her grand entrance into the world.

I must admit that I don't talk a whole lot to my kid. Maybe a few sentences a day is about it. I get really self-conscious doing it except when I'm alone, and even then it's weird. However, I don't mind turning up my radio as loud as I can stand it and jamming to oldies when we're in the car. She may not have Beethoven and Mozart as part of her early musical repertoire, but she will have rhythm and soul. She has been hit in the head as I drum the musical rhythm onto my belly and screech out the lyrics to my favorite music. I figure I might as well have control of the radio now while I can. Soon, it'll be all preschool happy songs. She'll likely be restricted to Veggie Tales songs as her CD and MP3 collection grows. At least Veggie Tales are cool.

She's taken to pushing her heel, knee, or elbow out in the last week or so in the same spot. She does it several times a day, and it looks like there's this little nodule sticking out of my stomach and then disappearing. Then it comes back. So, I said, "Fine. You wanna play? Let's play." So, I push the nodule back in my stomach whenever she sticks it out. Then she does it again. And I push it back in again. We do this several times, and my goal is to get her to at least roll over and do it on the other side of my stomach. However, she's as stubborn as her mama, and she quite likes poking the same spot on the right side over and over again. Sometimes, I even just push kinda hard on that side, just to make her mad. It works, and then she's moving and poking me all over. It makes me laugh.

Finally, I learned this great trick at our childbirth class this week. Take a flashlight, turn it on, and hold it up to your stomach in various places. Turn it off and on. See what your kid does. The first time I did it, she just was a little more active. I tried it a second time, and she kept kicking or hitting me in the exact place where the flashlight was placed on my stomach. Since she's able to detect light and dark now, I figure why not mess with her mind a little bit more.

So, most of my child's prenatal education has consisted of lots of rhythm and light. She's not surrounded by Bach or Spanish learning dialogues for children through headphones. I guess as long as I'm communicating with her somehow, and we're both having fun, she'll come out alright.