Poking back

Feeling the baby move is probably the most exciting monumental moment during pregnancy!!! There's nothing more magical than feeling the baby kick inside of you, and then being able to share that experience with others is so rewarding. I find myself already trying to show off what my baby can do... It's such an interesting phenomenon since pregnant women will feel the first kick at such different times - there's no predicting, based on maternal weight, whether or not this is her first pregnancy, how fast the baby grows in length, etc. The baby seems a million times more real once you get good at recognizing those baby kicks! My not-so-secret plan for when strangers start wanting to feel my growing belly is to put my hand on top of theirs and hold it in place, asking them earnestly if they can feel the baby kick. :) I use it for my own purposes sometime...like when my husband called her by her cousin's name instead of the name we've chosen for her, I told him that she was giving him the silent treatment - unless she kicked, to which I told him that she was clearly irritated and kicked to show him. Also, if I really want him to sing a song with me to Baby Penelope (our little fetus-baby), then I let him know when she starts kicking with excitement because she likes to hear us sing. She really starts showing her own personality - fetal movement really is measured in many scientific studies of fetal learning and development. So, whenever she kicks in response to my husband talking "to my belly," I know it's because she likes hearing him talk to her and wants to add to the conversation in the only way she can, at this point.

I'm also trying to monitor when she kicks to most often to determine how I'm doing in shaping her wake/sleep cycle, since her circadian rhythm starts showing up at 16 weeks. So, recently, I decided that perhaps my baby wakes up at 5am every morning. However, I think I've felt her earlier than that on occasion, and she seems to get riled up at night, close to 10pm, as well. So, I'm not sure, but if I don't feel her a while during the day, I do try to wake her up.
I also will try poking her to get her to move for other people, but my real experiment with poking is a plan to teach her about turn-taking. When I feel her kick, I try to poke her back in the same spot, in an effort to teach her to kick back so that we can have a pokey conversation-game. Babies are sensitive to cause and effect as well as turn-taking fairly early on, as shown by early language and cognitive development studies. For instance, when infants were presented with a green, fuzzy blob that made beeping noises in a rhythm similar to language/conversations, they would babble back to the blob-looking creature in a turn-taking fashion akin to that of a conversation between two people. So far, I'm not sure if she's catching on yet...more to come.