I’ve always loved music – playing it, singing it and listening to it – but somehow before I had my children work got in the way of music. Mine is not the sort of job where you can easily have background music. My children were my reason to reconnect with playing music and listening to music.

Another fabulous guest post from a lovely lady for The Lullaby Trust

Edspire readers I give you Kirsty McKinley

When I was on maternity leave with my first baby, Esbern, we always had background noise whether it was Radio 4 (Ebbe was a HUGE fan of John Humphries and the Archers) or Six Music we had noise all the time. And I introduced him to my music. When I was 38 weeks pregnant we went to a Kraftwerk Concert (not my greatest idea). E got so excited that I genuinely thought I was going to give birth in the car park. When he arrived we spent my maternity leave dancing to Goldfrapp and the Killers and House of the Rising Sun and all sorts of other music. We sang and played the piano. Ebbe still loves to accompany me on percussion or the guitar and he loves to dance.

But for sleep time we needed something calming and something just for us.

This was when Ebbe’s Daddy bought us the Lullaby CD from Rainbow Collections. It is beautiful and we were both instantly in love. The vocals are by Sophie Barker (of Zero 7) and the music is wonderfully calming and relaxing. We used to play it as every night for bathtime and putting on pyjamas. We never had very much routine except at bathtime and bedtime so it gave both Ebbe and I some continuity. We played it so often that I could sing the whole album from beginning to end. Ebbe knows the words so well that he can now sing them back to me.

The other songs that he can sing by heart form the entire soundtrack to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Again, available on CD it is fantastic for playing in the car and he loves to watch the film and dance to “My Old Bamboo”. We are quite the double act singing “You Two”. Again, this soundtrack has another beautiful lullaby in the form of “Hush a Bye Mountain” the lyrics of which are pertinent whether you are 3 or 33.

And then 2 years and 11 months later came Polly. While I was pregnant with Ebbe I played him Mozart in the evenings via large headphones stuck to my bump. Not so with Polly as I just didn’t have the time or the energy. But she did get two vivid musical experiences in the womb – my singing of the lullabies I had learnt from the Rainbow Collection CD and the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack played every time we travelled in the car (much to Daddy’s utter disgust!).

When Polly arrived it was a time of some tumult – we moved house into a dirty, falling down, “project” when she was only 6 days old and at the same time Ebbe was being tested for suspected cystic fibrosis. Happily the tests were negative but on the day we received that news we discovered that my husband’s mother was very ill. She died only 10 weeks later. Throughout this time evenings could be somewhat fraught as R was visiting his mum and I was managing with a very new baby and a very excitable toddler but I found that my collection of lullabies were an ideal way to calm everybody mentally and physically.

Now that everything is calmer I tend to sing only a few favourites now – “Lavender’s Blue Dilly Dilly”, “Row, row, row your boat”, “Hush little baby”, “Rock a bye Baby” and “Hush a bye Moutain” but these are family favourites that both of the children listen to rapt (and I am definitely not that good at singing).

And I also find that singing lullabies to children is a physical experience. It is a time when I can hold the children, when they are warm and quiet and want to be held and rocked in the semi darkness. They are calming for all of us, physically, emotionally and mentally.

I am back to work now and sometimes I can work long days. This may mean 12 hours where I only get home after bathtime as both Ebbe and Polly are going to bed. But it only takes 5 minutes to sing my collection of lullabies and we all use them to reconnect.

Music can be so powerful in creating memories and I only hope that these lullabies create happy and comforting experiences for my children in the future that they can use for comfort and to pass on to their children.