I have been informed that our baby can now hear our voices from inside the womb. This is at once amazing and distressing. On one hand it has meant that I have started talking to my lady's belly, singing to it, playing my guitars to it, and aiming music at her tummy with lovely results (our son seems to be very fond of old Def Leppard songs).
He seems to wriggle and make his presence felt during these moments of interaction. The thing is, the flipside of this is that we are trying to clean up our language.
Of course, it would be silly of us to expect our unborn soon to understand words like ****, ****, ****, **** or ******, or even to hear anything other than a muffled jumble of noises with our tone of voice, but we are doing our best to become sensible parents long before he is born.
My lady has even taken to coming up with her own swear words to use around him once he is out here in the big, noisy world. These are inoffensive outbursts that are all but meaningless to other grown ups, but in reality to us they signify some of the most brutally rude words in the English language.
So, to you my son, I hope you appreciate the fact that your impending arrival has already had an effect on how we talk and the way we live our lives. Mind you, no matter the hassle, no matter the difficulty, it will all be worth it just to be with you, my little boy. If you can hear me in there, hear me now: Your daddy loves you.
Heh, we do that! Seraphine has been known to inform us that Dora is being a Bürgermeister (German for a mayor). Another thing we have is that dirty words belong in the toilet and if someone wants to say them then they belong in the toilet, amazingly effective in a country where the German translations of children's films include swear words. Watching Finding Nemo in German the other night my jaw dropped to the floor when they kept saying Scheisse (which is about as strong as crap in Germany but still not something I want my kids saying!)
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