Bonding before birth

To tell the truth, I'm absolutely in love with our baby even before we've met him, so I don't have a bonding problem. Even though the thought of labour and delivery makes me really nervous, I can't wait to meet him and I think he'll make us a very lovely anniversary and Christmas present. He's due in Nov and we'd married early Dec last year and we'd first met each other three years ago in December as well, so he'll make an early present!

My old doc in KL told me to sing and talk with the baby. He said it would get him used to my voice and it would help his mental development. I know he was talking about playing the baby Mozart but I can't abide Mozart, so I just sang him whatever songs I knew. We've also got this made-up lullaby to the tune of "My Bonny lies over the ocean" with the words "My Bonny" subbed with "My Monkey". All the books I'd read said that newborns calm down when they hear or feel something that they've been familiar with in the womb. So I figured I might as well pick an easy to sing song and sing it over and over again to him while he's still inside. My hope was that if he was fussing, we could sing it to him and hopefully he'll recognise it as "Ah! That's the song the nice protective womb person sang to me all the time before I came out into this weird world!" and calm down.

Another thing we've been doing is playing Poke Me games. I've found out that he'll respond to my poking my tummy when he's active. If I poke my belly button, he'll respond with a kick there. If I poke somewhere else, he'll kick there instead. I was delighted when I first found out he was able to play even from the womb and have been playing Poke Me with him for a few weeks now. He doesn't always respond but when he does, I can play with him till my tummy's black and blue.

Just the other day, I found this article online about bonding with your baby before birth. I was delighted to find that whatever I'd been doing instinctively to bond with my baby were in the article. It made me feel a wee bit more confident that maybe I'm going to be okay at this motherhood thing and maybe I will know what to do. Check it out, mums-to-be (especially us first-timers!).