Get Prepared

WAITING ROOM BURNER: MUSIC MINI-QUIZ

By Ken Burke

Ever wonder what keeps your doctor so busy that you have to wait 57 minutes past your scheduled appointment? Maybe your physician and nurses are shuffling old X-rays and playing makeshift card games. ("Got any busted clavicles?" "Go fish!")

By now, you should know enough to bring your own reading material, considering you've read and re-read those outdated magazines in the waiting room. What to do? Take this music mini-quiz to learn what your music stance says about your parenting style. Then, share the unscientific results with your waiting room peers. It's a surefire way to burn the waiting time.

1. Playing music while pregnant will:

1. Stimulate the logic centers of your baby's rapidly developing brain.
2. Provide the appropriate soundtrack for a happy pregnancy.
3. Drown out your fears about financing your child's college education.

2. The relatively quiet and soothing strains of classical music will:

1. Gently stimulate your unborn baby's synaptic responses.
2. Help you remain calm and focused during labor.
3. Lull the baby's father into a zombielike coma.

3. Continuing to play gentle music for your newborn baby ensures:

1. A solid follow up to the work you started during gestation.
2. A relaxed, yet secure, atmosphere for your child.
3. Your child will start screaming the moment s/he experiences dead silence.

4. Allowing your toddler easy access to musical instruments will:

1. Encourage your child to create and solve problems in a supportive environment.
2. Provide your child with many enjoyable hours of constructive playtime.
3. Make sure that nobody ever drops in unexpectedly again.

5. In preparing the musical environment for the baby, the father's role is:

1. Whatever the mother says it is.
2. Whatever the mother says it is.
3. Whatever the mother says it is.

If you mainly answered:

A: You're a mom- or dad-to-be who plans everything. You already know your child's gender, name, feeding schedule, and who will kiss who during your child's first boy-girl party. You are secretly raising your child to change the destiny of the free world as we know it, but you will settle for a healthy kid.

B: You're a take-it-as-it-comes mom- or dad-to-be. Impending multiple births? "They'll be good company for each other." Hospital screw-up? "A lot of kids have their birth weight as a middle name." If music, folic acid, a few extra Tums make your little one a super-genius, great. If not, well...the world needs devastatingly good-looking normal people, too.

C: You're a been-there-done-that mom- or dad-to-be. All that heavy spiritual prep with your first kids made you realize if mom ain't happy, nobody's happy. You also learned that if you love 'em and keep 'em from doing irreparable damage, the kids will turn out better than okay.

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