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!
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.
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.
wonderful pea / 17279 posts
What a great idea! DH has been on a work assignment since January that takes him away all week. At first he was skeptical that reading to the baby on the weekend would do much in the way of bonding. He thought just our conversations would teach baby his voice. However, deliberate quiet time with a book does wonders. The baby moves when I put him on speaker. I’m sure your baby girl will turn her head the moment she hears you!
wonderful kiwi / 23653 posts
What a great idea! That way both babies will come out knowing your voices!
grapefruit / 4649 posts
That’s brilliant! I honestly was kind of skeptical about that type of product but this seems like an awesome application that I hadn’t even considered.
guest
this is great. what a wonderful idea. I can only imagine these books will be favorites in your house!
pomelo / 5220 posts
Aw, so sweet! What a great idea!
blogger / apricot / 310 posts
This is legit awesome!
pea / 6 posts
That’s such a cute idea! Can I ask what books you guys ended up reading? My husband just surprised me with a pair and we’ve been thinking about what to play.
blogger / apricot / 439 posts
@Hylidae: We just read a bunch of children’s books including “Little engine that could”, “Pout pout fish”, etc… It was fun, and I hope you have a good time with it too!