Did you have a preemie? Contribute your story to my new book!

I am collecting stories for a new ebook on preemies! I want to hear from any parents or grandparents who suddenly found themselves with a preemie and learned some valuable lessons about caring for their preemie! Of course 'm especially interested in hearing solutions that included music!

By Fall of 2008 I'm hoping to coming out with a new Ebook called something like "The Musical Guide to Caring for your New Preemie." I will price it very reasonably and even give it away when possible! If you send me your story I'll behappy to credit you and even put your baby's picture in it if you like!

Please share this with friends and family who might want to participate. You will also be entered in a drawing for a grand prize package that will include ALL of my latest CD's and Ebooks! Don't miss out on this!

Sincerely,

Dr. Alice Cash

Benefits of music during pregnancy

Michel Odent, M.D., believes that women have a profound need to sing to their babies but that the medicalization of birth has upset this process. In the past, women all over the world have sung lullabies to their babies. These were very important because as we now know the fetus is having first language lessons in the womb. The inflections of the mother tongue are conveyed not only through speech but most importantly through song. The singing voice has a richer frequency range than speech. In fact, studies in other disciplines such as linguistics and musicology (e.g., David Whitwell, 1993) point out that there was a time when speech was song and therefore singing is the older of the two. Babies born of deaf mothers miss these important first lessons in language development. French pioneer Dr. Alfred Tomatis mentions being intrigued by the fact that song birds hatched by silent foster mothers can't sing. What the baby learns in utero are the intonational patterns of sound and the frequencies of a language in his/her particular culture. Frequency is the level of pitch measured in Hertz (Hz.) This range varies between 16 to 20,000 Hz. There is very little distortion of the mother's voice as heard by the fetus whereas other external voices sound more muffled, especially in the higher frequencies. According to Rubel (1984), the fetus is responsive first to lower frequencies and then to higher ones.