recreating womb sounds
The awful infant swing comes with a different “melodies”, though I wonder who might consider those sounds melodious. I tend to pick something on the nature channel, depicted by what I’m guessing is supposed to be a bird. The first three “tracks” sound vaguely like water running, terribly electronic in their tinkling. I have no idea what the fourth one is supposed to be, but it sounds a bit like an old dial-up modem, complete with handshake signal. The fifth is what I select, and assume to be white noise, which works perfectly for putting Spice into this happy, hypnotic state to doze off to.
The problem? The spouse hates it.
Turns out, what sleepologists everywhere suggest for getting babies and adults to sleep sends my spouse into painful, teeth-grinding nightmare… when he can get to sleep. This has led to several scenarios taking place in our house, all variations on the spouse turning down or off the noise and the baby waking up or not falling off to sleep as easily.
So, I’ve resorted to trying other things. Loud, repetitive sounds seem to be the key. I tried Ozzy in the car with limited success; seems I’m more soothed by it than her. My mother burned me a CD with classical Indian music which works well enough that I haven’t removed it from the car to copy to my computer for fear that I might forget to put it back in the car. Yesterday, she calmed to Morrissey, though that might just have been from horror at my chipper sing-a-long with The Last of the Famous International Playboys. Bob Marley‘s Is This Love was only a minor success, so perhaps her tastes aren’t fully developed yet. We’ve also tried birdsongs, jungle river, tropical rain, thundering rainstorms, thunderbolts and lightning… mamma mia.
This morning I scoured Amazon’s MP3 Downloads looking for something like womb sounds. Most of what I found was cheesy crap, stuff a deaf baby would scream to turn off. Then I found it, the perfect baby-calming track, an hour-long continuous heartbeat to the sound of waves. Amazing. Spice calmed and gurgled to the preview, so I splurged on all $.99 of it.
While his father was recently here visiting the baby, the spouse and him set up the downstairs guest bedroom as the movie-watching room. (Futon = bed OR couch.) They set the new projector up, and hardwired surround-sound speakers to the wall. Now, thanks to the Blu-Ray feature on the PS3, we have an amazing setup for watching movies at home, which is great since we probably won’t make it to the theater for, oh, about a decade.
With Spice’s swing in there, she now gets the full surround-sound experience of swinging to a steady heartbeat and enough waves to drown a whale. I think I’ll start calling it the “womb room”…
