Jennifer recently brought home a book called “Happiest Baby on the Block“. The subtitle is The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer. I was a little skeptical about there being a “New” way of dealing with something like babies, who have been around forever. My best guess was that the subtitle was a little marketing bull or, just maybe, there was something new, like robots being involved…
No robots, but it is hard to argue with the early results. When I went home for lunch today, Baby Gabe was up in arms, very fussy and unhappy, despite being freshly changed and recently fed. So, per the book, we swaddled Gabe up very snugly, including having his arms wrapped inside the blanket. We then proceeded to rock him to the point that I was really swinging him around in the air, all while the vacuum cleaner was going full blast. I haven’t read up on the details, but all this apparently simulates the womb somehow.
In about 10 seconds, Gabe went from a complete fuss-bucket to being absolutely calm and quiet. It was kind of freaky how quickly he went from being inconsolable to being as cool as a cucumber, compounded by the fact that he looked like some kind of little larva, with just his head sticking out of his blanket.
This seemed to be a lasting calm. Jennifer put Gabe into a sling that can be worn over the shoulder and he went right to sleep without making a single chirp, and was sleeping like, well, sleeping like a baby when I left to go back to work.
I have high hopes that we can repeat the experiment with the same results. In retrospect, it is interesting to note that we had some success with a somewhat simular method: long middle-of-the-night car drives. When it was just Gabe and me in the car, I would drive around with the radio turned on. The car rides would calm the baby every time, but he would often wake up shortly after the ride was over, sometimes before I even had him back in the house. Here’s hoping the the 5 S’s come through.
When all else fails, I always seem to have good luck with the ether-soaked rag. Just cover the mouth and nose wtih one of those suckers and they’e out like a light!
Actually, you beat me to the punch but I was going to mention the car ride thing too. I read somewhere that they like the humming of the wheels, again probably a womb thing. It worked like a charm with both of my kids and I was lucky in that once my kids are out, there’s nothing can wake them up. If you don’t feel like a car ride, you can try to just hum in low monotone in their ears. That seemed to usually work ok for me too. Something about that constant hum seemed to calm them down.