Kicking out the jam

According to my various pregnancy references, I am now at a stage where, they say, the baby’s hearing is now sufficiently developed to recognise voices and to respond to music.

They also suggest that now is the time I should start playing soothing music to the baby so that when it is finally born, the same piece of music can be used for settling.
From my reading, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons seems to be regarded as the piece of choice for unborn babies, with varying levels of kicking supposedly becoming apparent during each of the four movements.

While I think we may even have this particular piece of music in our collection, I’m afraid we’re tenaciously clinging to the kind of music that reminds us of our glory undergraduate days of the early 1990s. In other words, a lot of indie pop and other guitar-laden expressions of other peoples’ youths. Or, in other words, nothing the pregnancy books would find even remotely appropriate.

I do remember as a child thinking my mum’s Janis Ian tape was pretty hot, so I’m taking that as proof that it is possible to brainwash your children for at least a certain period of time. I am fully aware that by the time Pedro is old enough to tune the car radio into Triple J he’ll be old enough to openly deride our CD collection. It is after all, the natural order of things.

Anyway, we’re doing what we can while we still can. On Wednesday night we trekked down to Melbourne for Pedro’s first gig – Wilco at the Palais. Again, hard to tell whether kicking indicates happiness or a keen desire to get as far away from the source of noise as possible, but there was a lot of it. More during the guitar solos than the singing bits it has to be said, at which moments it felt like Pedro doing a fairly extreme air drum solo right across my belly. Fortunately for his mother he piped down by about the half way mark, only waking again for the encore performance of California Stars.

It’s been a while since either of us have been to a concert and it was nice to know I could still go out and do normal adult things in the big city even though I'm a six-month pregnant hephalump.
The only difference being that I was exceedingly grateful for the allocated seating (although the crowd collectively rebelled and stood for the three encores), I didn’t get to indulge in the overpriced Crown Lagers, and I don’t think I can remember ever doing pelvic floor exercises in time to the music before.

(apologies for that last piece of too much information)