One of the things that I most worry about with our surrogate’s pregnancy is that the baby she is carrying might not bond with me and Mr. Starfish right away. A big reason that I worry about this is because we are not physically close to the pregnancy and baby on a day-to-day basis since our surrogate is located in Utah and we are located in Chicago, the baby naturally cannot hear our voices every day. Thankfully, I have found a work-around for this little problem with a nifty little device called Bellybuds!

belly buds

Bellybuds are special speakers that can be attached to a pregnant belly, through which any type of voices or sounds or music can be played to the baby. The speakers are wide flat circles that attach to the belly through adhesives. The device can be hooked up to your phone just like normal earphones, and so you can easily play to your baby anything that you can access on your phone.

We purchased Bellybuds around our surrogate’s 20-week pregnancy milestone, with the understanding that this is when a baby can start to hear sounds. I asked my mother, who is an elementary school reading specialist, for a huge stack of recommended baby and children’s books, and Mr. Starfish and I went to work recording our voices for our baby. We sat down over the course of a couple of days and took turns reading books on a recording. It was fun and easy and we figured that it benefited both of our baby girls, because while we made sure to capture our voices on the microphone, we also positioned my belly around our voices so that the baby that I’m carrying was hearing the same stories as her sister.

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Getting these stories over to our surrogate was super easy as well. We just emailed her the voice recordings and she was able to save them to her phone. A couple of times each week, our surrogate finds a quiet moment, pulls up the audio files, hooks the belly buds to her phone and belly, and – voila! – it’s storytime for our baby girl with her parents!

We’ve been told by our surrogate that our baby girl can be felt moving around more than normal when she hears our voices come on over the Bellybuds. This warms my heart and makes me hope that we are bonding, despite the huge distance between us and our baby girl. I also hope that our voices will be more familiar to her once she makes her appearance in June.

Although the verdict is still out because our baby girl still hasn’t arrived, so we can’t know with certainty if the Bellybuds are working, I would recommend them to anyone undergoing a surrogate pregnancy. At the very least, just the action of reading the books to our baby girl helped me and Mr. Starfish to bond with her and to feel more involved with the pregnancy.