The fresh scent of newly purchased books from the new mini library had started filling up my room. The vibrant colours, the soft textures, and the dreamy stories all transported me to a completely new world. It almost felt like I was reliving my childhood in a new way. It was funny how I found myself enjoying reading through so many hardbound baby books at my age. I couldn’t wait till my baby arrived. The excitement was hard to contain. Plus the anxiousness about how busy it would get with a new baby made me want to prepare for everything beforehand.

I thought to myself, this would be a beautiful addition to the list of conversations with my baby, snuggled up inside my womb. So, I picked a favourite, The Lion King, and read it to my little one every day. It happened to be the first book I bought and ended up becoming a part of our little daily ritual. I tried to build a pattern around it as well to set my baby’s natural clock. I read at the same time every day and used the same tone and punctuations. Life is much simpler when it has a routine and I enjoyed passing on that comfort to my little one. I still have this book and will probably end up framing it for keeps.

This was not the start of the conversations with my baby. Very early on, I had started talking to my little Simba. You may feel a bit strange in the beginning to do this. But it’s never too early to start building that connection with the most special person in your life. Even science says that babies have a fully developed ear by 24 weeks of gestation and can even start detecting sounds as early as 16 weeks. So much so that they can even follow differences in languages, intonation and build familiarity with certain voices. If you’ve read the Mahabharata, you will know that Abhimanyu is said to have learned certain war skills while in his mother’s womb. I for one believed strongly that I could impact my child positively much before he was born. Not just by eating right and staying fit but also by way of how I thought, reacted and spoke.

I had this device that acted like a sound transmitter to the baby. My husband had picked it up among the many other things for the little prince to come while on one of his trips abroad. So every morning before the sounds of the world clogged up, I read my baby his story. I used to strap up the two sponge padded speakers to my tummy using a Velcro belt and talk into the mouthpiece. This way my voice could reach the baby directly cutting out all the other distracting sounds in the background. When I was not reading out to my baby, I was secretly flipping through the pages of the lovely new baby books. It didn’t seem too early to get to know about all the fun characters that would fill the imaginary world of my little one.

Music was another soothing chapter that continued to unfold during my pregnancy. I wanted music to have an important influence in my son’s life. Different patterns of sounds have a different impact on your moods – same make you joyful, some are calming, some make you loving. It just changes the chemistry of your mind and I wanted to pass on the beauty of this experience to my son in the womb. Indian classical music has a very technical arrangement of sounds scientifically proven to impact human well-being. As a child, I learned Carnatic music for four years. After getting married, I took up Hindustani classical for 3 years and was learning until I was well into my second trimester. During my riyaz, I found myself in an almost meditative state, happy, calm and relaxed. I had to stop unfortunately because my teacher was moving out of the country. She was kind enough to share her best collections with me which later became the background music in my son’s room for the first six months of his life.

My passion for music and the desire to expose my unborn son to melodious sounds also gave me the idea of hosting mini-concerts at my home. So instead of going to the movies, I organised small events at home with 5-6 music lovers. I once invited a sitar artist with tabla, next a sarangi/tabla combination and also a classical singer and so on. Few friends who were also interested in music used to come over. We even set the mood by dimming the lights, putting in a lot of candles and incense sticks. I remember serving an organic fruit platter at the end as well that everyone very much looked forward to. The only rule was no phones and no chitchatting during the performance. I thoroughly enjoyed these evenings with music, family, friends and my son kicking away with every pleasant musical sensation.

Many years down the line, my eyes light up every time my son’s teachers tell me that he’s always humming while doing his work. He’s turned out to be a total music lover, started learning singing at a very young age and he’s also learning to play an instrument. May he always continue to relish the good things in life and stay happy!