My daughter “the diva” is now 11 months old, but she’ll be turning 1 in three days. About a week after she turned 11 months, she started to do a real crawl! I was thrilled because most of the other babies I’ve seen were crawling at like 8 months old. She can’t pull herself fully up to a standing position, but she goes to the tippy tops of her knees and then she get frustrated since she can’t get up any further. Sometimes I give her a little boost and she can pull herself up from that point. She now opens & closes her hands, and can also put her hands on her head. Today I looked in her mouth and the poor thing has 4 molars coming in, and 2 incisor teeth. No wonder she’s been super cranky this week. We go to the doctor for her 1-year checkup/shots ON her birthday. Good thing she won’t know it’s her birthday because I feel bad about her having to get shots then.

As for music, she still loves to sway and sing along when her dad plays guitar for her. It’s funny because my husband and I will harmonize on a song and hold the note, and she will belt out a flat note REALLY loudly and makes us crack up. A few weeks ago I was cleaning the floor, so I decided to play some music to help me deal with the chore. I was playing Nine Inch Nails (NIN) and the song “Hurt” came on. “The Diva” was playing with her toys on a mat, and about 10 seconds after Trent Reznor stars singing, she started humming and then singing really loudly. I was surprised because “Hurt” isn’t the kind of song with a strong beat or rhythm, at least in the beginning, and the vocals aren’t high pitched or upbeat. Then I remembered that this child has been hearing the band Ours and other melancholy music her entire life, so why wouldn’t she respond to that sort of music. Haha.

Since her 1st birthday is on February 8th, we were going to have her very first party this Saturday, the 6th. We never throw parties so this is a big deal. I bought all kinds of decorations, I bought lots of food for cooking & baking, I was going to order a pretzel tray, an ice cream cake, and we were going to have just family over, so we were expecting 17 people. Well, as any of you who live in the North East know, it’s freakin’ snowing out as I type this. Let me rephrase that. It’s a blizzard outside! We’re expecting about 12 inches of snow, and all of the people who were supposed to come to the party live about an hour away, and many of them won’t drive even if it’s only 5 inches of snow. I was going back and forth like crazy yesterday trying to decide if I should cancel it or not, because I never trust the forecasts. But it looks like this is definitely going to be a bad one, so I had to cancel it. I rescheduled it for the following Saturday instead, but because it’s last minute and Valentine’s Day weekend, 4 or 5 of the people can’t come to the party now. I’m annoyed with Mother Nature because I bought all this food to make like 2 big ziti’s among other things, and now I don’t need that much. Plus I’ll probably have to buy new produce since that stuff goes bad so quickly. I also heard that we might get snow next wknd also. If that happens, I’m just going to have her party anyway, and whoever shows up, shows up. Even if it’s just us three and maybe I’ll invite the neighbors to help eat the food. I’m not good with change and love consistency, so whenever this last minute stuff comes up it drives me insane. I feel bad for my little girl, but I know that 1 year olds have no clue what’s going on anyway. Hopefully having snow on her birthday doesn’t become a pattern, like that one little girl I saw in the news who is 3 or 4 years old and has never had a birthday party because EVERY one of them has been canceled due to snow. Poor kid.

We didn’t waste any time introducing our daughter to live music. On her 2ndday home from the hospital, my husband treated her to her first living room concert, which consisted of him playing acoustic guitar and singing, with me harmonizing. He played a variety of alternative rock covers and a few originals, and I think it was the most captive audience he ever had. While in her bouncy seat, she didn’t take her little eyes off of him or the guitar. She seemed to enjoy the show, which for an infant basically meant that she didn’t cry. Haha. That evening I played her cds which included some of the same songs I used to play her on my mp3 player when she was in my belly. I figured it would be calming to her since it would be something familiar. Yes, who knew that Nine Inch Nails could be associated with calming a baby.  “The Frail” off of “The Fragile” album, anyone?

Over the next few weeks, my husband continued to perform little concerts for our daughter and she actually seemed to develop preferences. Besides liking the songs she was familiar with from hearing them in utero, she liked Guns N Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine,” which is kind of funny because I hate that song. I have no respect for Axl Rose or his behavior, I don’t like his voice, his dancing, or his songs. So it’s a little amusing, and annoying, that my “musically groomed” child not only likes “Sweet Child of Mine”, but also “Patience,” and”November Rain” by GNR. My husband likes those songs, so he continues to play them for her. I think the only reason she likes “Sweet Child of Mine” is because of the guitar intro in the song. I guess it kind of resembles the sound of a nursery lullaby. Speaking of lullabies, she absolutely LOVES the song “Meet Me in the Tower,” off the album “Distorted Lullabies,” by the band Ours. Because of that, I haven’t lost faith that she will develop a good taste in music, like her mom. In a future blog post I’ll explain more in how that song saved my sanity for the first 3 months of her life.

The outcome of having two musical parents is that they tend to write a lot of songs about their life, which includes their children. So my daughter already has about 5 songs about her. But they aren’t real songs. They are jingles. Really corny, kid-friendly jingles. The kind that you don’t really want other people to hear you sing, but you know that it makes your child smile or laugh, so you sing them anyway.  I’ll embarrass myself by singing to her in public about her belly button or her Love Bug toy just to get a squeal. Maybe the true test of being a parent is being willing to make a fool out of yourself to make your baby happy. If so, I passed with flying colors.

I was just about 37 weeks pregnant and the baby was still breech. People stopped saying to me that she has plenty of time to turn, because we were running out of time. The doctor mentioned that if the baby was still breech for the next appointment, then he’ll try external version which is when they try to turn the baby from pushing on your stomach (which I hear is pretty painful and doesn’t always work). My hospital doesn’t attempt vaginal births for breech babies. I began to get desperate and didn’t want to play the waiting game any longer so I started to research what I can do. I found a list of a variety of things and I pretty much did ALL of them. The funniest of which were the different physical positions, like laying on your back on the floor with your legs up against the couch sticking straight up in the air (breech tilt). Or getting on all fours and laying your arms and top-half of your body on the ground, so that your butt is sticking up to the highest point possible (cat stretch-ah, how I hope the mailman didn’t see me those days). Or laying on your back with your knees bent and putting 3 huge pillows under your butt (pelvic tilt). Or trying to do this choreographed “crawl” around my entire house on hands and knees (on hardwood floors), which gave me a lovely array of knee bruises.  I also sat on my exercise ball and would rotate my hips around in a circle for about 30 minutes at a time.

The less physical methods included meditation and focused thinking, such as picturing my baby turning; putting an ice pack on my stomach; very light self-massages in a circle motion on my belly. I would shine a flashlight on my belly from up high and slowly move the light down to where the head _should_ be; the idea being that the baby wants to follow the light with its eyes/head. I would sit at work and do this in between my work assignments. I would also do the same thing with tapping my hand, instead of using a flashlight, hoping the baby would follow the noise. My husband would talk to my pelvic area in hopes that the baby would follow the sound. But the method I used the most was playing music from my mp3 player and putting the headphones up to my pelvic area. I found myself using a set mix of about 10 songs, mostly softer-sounding alternative rock-type songs, and a few slow pop songs.  I tended to use higher pitch songs since I heard that babies seem to like high pitched voices. My song list included “Dizzy”, “Meet Me in the Tower”, and “Places” by Ours (these became my “staple” songs throughout my pregnancy), “The Frail” by Nine Inch Nails, most of the “Ok Computer” album by Radiohead, “Angel” and “I Love You” by Sarah McLachlan, “Turn My Head” by Live, “Angel Standing By” by Jewel, and “I Grieve” by Peter Gabriel. I also put some original songs from my husband on my mp3 player, one which included both of us singing, and played them to the baby down low, since she would prefer our voices over anyone else’s. One day I finally got some validation that the baby could hear the music. I didn’t realize that my mp3 player was up on full volume and I started to play a song to her, while holding the earbud down very low in the pelvic area. When the music started (very loudly), I felt the baby jump. I scared her! I felt bad, but then I was elated, because I knew for a fact she could hear. After that day I made sure the volume was on a better level.

I had read that being so far along in my pregnancy, you can feel if and when the baby turns. Some women said they totally felt the baby flip, and that it was the biggest baby movement ever. My baby had always kicked/moved a lot and you could see her moving if you looked at my belly. But during this period of trying to get her to turn, I felt nothing like a huge movement and was convinced that she was still breech when I walked into my Week 38 doctor’s appointment. I was shocked when the doctor felt my belly and said she turned! I don’t know which of the 20 or so methods did it, or if it just happened anyway, but I was thrilled! So to all those women carrying breech babies…don’t give up. And keep trying these methods you hear about, because I am one case where it DID work, so stay positive and get on all 4’s girl! haha.

Live concert Ed Kowalczyk

From that experience, it was around this time that I became aware of the connection that the music I listen to can have on the baby. I was psyched! You always hear about how babies love classical music, instrumental music, soft music, etc., but what about modern rock music? Why does it always have to be Bach over Radiohead? Mozart over Muse? Beethoven over Nine Inch Nails? I do like the classics, but I wanted my baby to hear some drums also! From that point on, I decided I would start exposing the baby to “my” music right away, in utero, instead of waiting until it was born. So at 5 months my husband started to play acoustic guitar and sing to my belly all the time. I would also play acoustic guitar and piano as loudly as I could. I’m no where near as good on guitar as my husband, but I don’t think the baby knows chords yet, so it didn’t matter. Haha. Whenever I was in my car I would turn the radio up very loud so the baby could hear it. And I was still going to concerts. I hardly even looked pregnant and I felt great (none of those horrible pregnancy symptoms yet that women can get), so why not? The only change at shows was I became more aware of my surroundings so that I wasn’t in a place where I could get shoved or squished, and I always carried a bottle of water. Who says you can’t do much while pregnant? Ha!