For the love of John...

Music has always been one of my best friends. You know, Julie, Anna, Lori, and...Music. A friend of mine once gave me a cartoon that showed a gathering of people in evening wear, all wearing Walkmans. At the bottom she penned in her own caption "Alice's idea of a party." My taste is wide and varied and goes according to mood.

Of course when I found out I was pregnant the first time, I thought, "This baby will be exposed to nothing but the finest, most beautiful music. I will be the most serene expectant mother, piping Haydn and Brahams and Bach's cello concertos to my child in utero, and she will come out expectantly waiting for me to turn on La Traviata." So for the first four and a half months I played and played and played and played music. All the baby books said that the child would begin to respond to the music and move. Not mine. I played it a little louder. Nothing. I got out the Beethoven and tried to blast her into action with some overtures. Nothing.

Secretly, I became bored. I love classical music, but you know. The violins and the cellos and the flutes and the on and on and on. I secretly missed my driving music. And obviously this baby was immune to music. I would sneak it into the CD player. She would never know. I put in John Mellencamp's "The Best That I Could Do." Someday I'll devote an entire entry to my love of this man and how he is a Midwestern poet and his music forms the soundtrack of my life. There is only one person whom I would completely lose my chili if I ever met them, and it is him. Ahem. Moving along, I popped the CD in, and within the first couple of beats of "Hurts So Good," the baby began to kick. Fluke? I switched to "Jack and Diane." More movement, this time almost rhythmically. By the time we got to the "Authority Song" she was full out dancing. No lie. It got so that if I ever worried that she hadn't moved much that day, all I had to do was put on John Mellencamp, and she'd began to dance. She even got so that she could distinguish his songs from everything else that was on the radio.

During one of our many OB visits, Darren asked the doctor, "How can we know, how can we really know, even if our test results are negative, that the baby will be healthy and won't have Down's or spina bifida?" and she said, "You can't. The only time you know is when you're holding the baby in your arms." The she added, "I don't have too many worries about a baby who can dance to Mellencamp already though."