A book we've been reading argues that babies are born not entirely ready and that their first three months or so are like a "fourth trimester". Therefore, the author says, to calm your crying baby, simulate the sensations of the womb. One of these sensations is the constant background white noise of being inside the womb -- which is why shushing, appliance noise, etc can help calm a baby. For fun, I spent a few hours today making some noise-based womb music. Aside from various noise sources and some of those wavestation sounds I love so well, I slipped in a pretty loop from one of my favorite songs. The first is the finished track; the other two are some bits of noise I recorded while assembling it. I plan on making a cd of stuff like this to try on betty when she arrives.
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The 'human babies are all born 3 months premature' idea seems to be pretty universally accepted these days; I've read about it in many books, and it fits my experience with both of our kids.
Just brace yourself for the fact that there will be plenty of times when, no matter what you do, the baby will cry inconsolably until she exhausts herself. It was a pretty common evening thing for us during the first few months. The white noise might help; it seems like all of the things we tried succeeded infrequently, but only just often enough to reward us into trying them over and over.
An evil baby could probably train the parents into learning and repeating arbitrarily complicated rituals — "the only thing that stops her crying is when we put green bulbs in all the lamps and play 'Dark Side Of The Moon' backwards and wear lampshades over our heads while humming Bulgarian lullabies through kazoos and walking backwards." (Did you ever read William Sleator's "House Of Stairs"?)
I haven't read of "house of stairs", but it sounds interesting. I saw one of the reviewers on Amazon mentioned "cube" -- have you seen that?
(It was funny to see all those Amazon reviews by people in My Generation who read the book as a kid and still remembered it, just like me. I guess every school library in the country must have gotten a copy around the same time ... I think I read it around 1980.)
I never heard of that book.. I've been wanting to reread other childhood favorites lately though. must be a becoming-a-parent thing (and I'm also looking forward to an excuse to buy lego etc)
http://www.originalbellyworks.com/h
"I have long been interested in sleep, the unconscious and the subconscious when it comes to audio, listening and music. With the birth of my first daughter I became particularly interested in sleep and how to get more of it. I composed several pieces of simple drone music as an aid to our family to try to help us relax and sleep. Jimmy’s piece led me back to some of these thoughts about sleep and particularly what role audio plays during sleep, getting us to sleep, meditation, relaxation, dreaming."