Before I Got Here

October 3, 2005
Sometimes precocious, sometimes eerie, but nearly always with a spiritual bent, these anecdotes collected by actor Underwood revolve around, as the title suggests, children's lives before they were born. In many cases, this means a prior life, as in the three-year-old who told her mother she had sandals like her when she was a mommy "before I came to you." Other children told their parents they picked them while in heaven. Underwood, in his introduction, writes about a conversation he had with his four-year-old son in which his son said God told him about the rapture, but he "only had one ear at the time, so he could only hear a little." The book undoubtedly has a direction, but not an overly clear one; children's dreams, a Virgin Mary sighting, and a host of snippets that soft focus on the wonders of growth, discovery and parenting are thrown into the mix alongside full-color photographs of children eating ice cream, hugging, meditating and looking pensive. Parents with a strong sense of spirituality who are bowled over by the rigors of childrearing will find solace between these covers.