For mommies and daddies around the world, music tends to play a very important role in the nightly duties. Grandma’s songs, rhymes, folk songs, just random strings of words. Anything and everything will be tried to make the little monsters (angels?) sleep! In our house, we have used a combination of singing (mostly by the out-of-tune mumma) and playing something from iTunes and/or You Tube (mostly by the tech-savvy dadda).
Before little Baby H entered our lives, I had this picture in my mind. A perfect-mommy-world, where I was able to auto-tune my bub’s reactions. So the plan was to get him so attuned to sleeping on one particular song that the minute he heard those familiar strings, his eyes would grow heavy and before he (we) knew it, he would just be fast asleep.
Alas, babies never figure out the grand plans and conspiracies that grown-ups want to shower them with.
The song we picked was the classic Bollywood oldie of Lakdi ki Kathi. It worked – for about 3 weeks. And after those blissful three weeks, instead of drifting off to a peaceful sleep, he would scream and squirm whenever the song started. At one point he put both his hands on his face and said, “No Nani! Not that song!” My mum (his Nani) controlled her laughter with great difficulty and decided this needed to change.
We tried some Doctor Google as well, especially in the early colicky months. A quick search for “music to make baby sleep” actually yields hundreds of instrumental YouTube videos. There are so many interesting ones – perhaps they actually do work (much like those Beethoven songs that Mums play to their bumps to make them smarter). But in our case *ahem*, two out of the three people in the room were asleep within a minute, the third had decided that eyes wide open is how he likes his “guaranteed lullaby” to be played!
The funny thing is that we have managed to convert the following unlikely contenders into successful lullabies – the peppy beats of Sunny Sunny by Yo Yo Honey Singh (eeks!), Phillip Phillips crooning Gone Gone Gone, the classics like if you’re happy and you know it or the A-B-C song, the recent dance party anthem – Kar Gayi Chull, John Denver’s Leaving on a Jetplane, random nursery rhymes like Five Little Ducks or Hickory Dickory Dock, and even the funky rock of Cake’s Short Skirt Long Jacket, among many other, equally confounding choices.
But they’re all so different! Which one will work on any particular night, you might ask.
Well, my theory is that an effective lullaby basically needs familiarity and repetition. The music can be of any genre, the beats or words just need to be on a loop, and eventually, it just becomes background noise that pushes the little one into la-la land (hopefully before the parents get there themselves!).
What works (or has worked) with your little one?
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