Start the bedtime story habit before your baby is born

Long before a baby can see your face, they can hear your voice. From around the middle of pregnancy, a baby begins to pick up sound from the world outside — muffled, warm, and rhythmic — and the sound they come to know best is the voice of the person carrying them. They don't follow the plot. They feel the cadence, the calm, the closeness.

So we built something for that quiet stretch of the evening before a baby arrives: gentle, read-aloud stories written for your bump.

A nightly ritual that can start early

The Dreamtime habit has always been simple — you read, your little one listens. There's no reason that has to wait until they're here. Adding your bump turns those last weeks and months into a soft, repeatable ritual: a few unhurried minutes, a warm voice, the same calm each night. It's less about what the story says and more about the steady, familiar sound of you saying it.

What a bump story is like

These aren't shrunken-down toddler tales. They're written to be read aloud and felt:

• Soft and rhythmic — short lines, gentle refrains, a slow lullaby cadence.
• Calm by design — warmth, heartbeat, water, hush. No peril, no plot to resolve, nothing that asks anything of you at the end of a long day.
• Timeless — about closeness and being held right now, not a countdown to a "big day."

Then, when your baby arrives, you simply add their birthday — and their stories grow with them, from those first newborn weeks all the way up through childhood.

Gentle, and always in your control

Adding a bump is entirely optional, and you're always in charge of it. Pregnancy holds a lot of feeling, and we've tried to handle this with the care it deserves: nothing is pushy, nothing assumes, and you can change or remove it at any time, quietly.

How to add your bump

1. Open Dreamtime and go to Settings → Children (or add one during onboarding).
2. Tap Add a child, then choose On the way.
3. Pop in a name and a due date — that's it.

That evening, the reading can begin.