Now We'll NEVER Get the Kid Out of His (or Her) Womb

Well, they — whoevertheHECK they are — say parents-to-be should talk to their budding offspring in the womb.
Actually, parents-to-be is the wrong term, because when a bun is in the oven, they technically are parents already. And, even though Brendan is firm in not wanting to know the gender, and Erica is honoring his wishes (as far as I know, anyway, although there’s the distinct possibility that she knows and already has bought a bunch of blue, or pink, clothes), they are parents.
They — and, as I said, whoevertheHECK they are — say you should play calming music to calm the budding infant; perhaps elevator music of Barry Manilow’s greatest hit, I suppose. (I use the singular form of “hit” at the risk of offending Manilow fans because, well, the world is made up of two kinds of people: Manilow fans and those who make fun of him, for some reason. Seems kind of mean, because he’s obviously a huge talent. I’m not sure how I ended up on the wrong side of his soundtracks, but here I am.)
I suppose it would be better to play Manilow’s “I Can’t Smile Without You” to calm the child rather than scare the hell out of him/her by exposing it to the “Hellboy II” flick that featured the song. (If we only KNEW whether it’s a boy or a girl, and if it were a boy, I could say the song would scare the HELL outta the boy.)



I suppose there’s some truth to the singing-to-calm-the-baby-in-the-womb theory, which basically seems to be it eases the baby’s angst about all the other noises out here in the netherworld. But who can prove it, because none of us remembers what we heard in the womb? After all, we were preoccupied with kicking Mom so she and Dad could watch the poke from her belly.
Anecdotally, though, I have these observations:

Either Vincent wasn’t prepared properly inside the womb, or he was just too sensitive once he got outside, or, MOST likely, Melissa and Skip were just too dadgum protective. All of us visitors literally had to tiptoe around the house because the lad jumped at the slightest noise and squinted if you even tried to open a shade. So they lived in nearly total silence and darkness for his first several months.

Mom and Dad let their guard down a tad with Jack, and you could even carry on a conversation above a whisper when he was a baby. He just wasn’t as jumpy as the firstborn.

The decibel level rose a bit more when Luke was in the womb, because it’s hard to keep a couple of toddlers quiet, and Vincent and Jack were anything but quiet.

By the time an egg and a sperm got together to generate what one day would emerge as Patrick, the noise level around their household was nothing short of the junction of all the runways at a major airport.
In short, by that time, Vincent, Jack and Luke had become accustomed to raising such a ruckus that Patrick has been able to sleep through any noise from the get-go. He had become accustomed to the thunder in the womb.
Which brings us back to Brendan and Erica. Erica slipped me a photo of my son singing to his son — or daughter, who knows? — at a recent wedding they attended.
Well, they’ll be lucky if child services doesn’t come knocking on their door, because I’ve heard Brendan sing, and I think it could be classified as child abuse. (I know, because I think he inherited his pipes from me, and the list of my greatest hits isn’t anywhere near as long as Manilow’s.)
But Erica’s note made it sound like such a sweet gesture, singing “Sweet Child of Mine” to a baby in its mother’s womb. Erica noted that the DJ was playing that song at the wedding reception they were attending (pay no attention to what appears to be a beer cup in Brendan’s hand; I’m sure he’s the type who would forgo imbibing out of sympathy for mommy’s having to do the same).
My assumption of sweetness arose from the fact that I never had heard of the song, but it seems so lullabyish, not unlike a Barry Manilow song. So I checked YouTube, and found THIS:



Well, I guess the Guns ’N Roses melody (if you can call it that) isn’t about a baby after all — at least, not the infant type, although it’s obviously a girl.
But if he/she survives the eardrum-breaking cacophony of Brendan’s doing a Guns ’N Roses karaoke gig at a wedding reception, the child should be able to survive anything.
It’s better than facing post-partum depression if he/she were dragged out of the womb, kicking and screaming out of fear that Barry Manilow wrote all the songs that made the whole world sing — Barry Manilow songs. Speaking of, let's at least give Manilow his due — he's a good sport, after all — with a sing-along: