Baby Soothing Open Thread

With my nephew, I had great luck with bounces of a higher amplitude. I would hold him against my chest and bend my knees, dropping sharply about 6 inches or so, then straighten and bounce again. I'd keep that up until he fell asleep. I think the sharper drop worked as a sudden surprise, like the blowing-in-the-face, but the rhythm would then lull him to sleep, or at least relaxation.

That being said, with my own child on the way, I don't think my knees can take too much more of that. But a friend suggested using one of those inflatable exercise balls. You can deflate it for travel (remember the pump!), and bounce on it where ever you are.

Good luck!

K

In addition to the "gentle agitation", sometimes a low drone (with or without chanting or "om") helps. Other than that, when I saw the title I clicked to give pretty much exactly the same advice as you already have posted.

I recommend a short book (I recommended it on a previous thread, too, but, damn, it worked so well for us I can't help but push it) called "The Happiest Baby on the Block". But I'll summarize the most useful tips:

1) TIGHT swaddling. The technique in the book works well, The Miracle Blanket (google it) works even better. Combined with your bouncing technique, it's doubly effective. Add a pacifier for another calm-multiplier (someone should write a book about the parallels between parenting and RPGs).

2) Loud (80-90 db) white noise. Microphones in the womb (who volunteers for these studies?) have recorded the sound of rushing blood at about this level. Hair dryers and vacuum cleaners are a good quick fix. It's weird watching how quickly an infant relaxes when exposed to a sound we tend to find grating.

3) Lying them on their stomach/side for a while.

My Belgian friends report that the finger thing works a lot better if you dip the finger in beer first.

Seriously!

Any sort of vibration, for example leaving the baby on the laundry dryer, or going for a car ride around the block.

Car ride around and around the block worked. More to your background, I would sing him the periodic table. Not the Tom Lehrer version, the standard version, but sung to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Also played tapes and albums. He seemed to like Bach best.

With only one datum--my now one-year old son--it's hard to say what was luck and what actually worked. But we followed Harvey Karp's "Happiest Baby on the Block" and generally think it worked. I'd actually recommend the DVD over the book--the book is padded and repetitive, and you get a much better idea how to do the swaddling by watching the DVD.

Karp's theory is that the evolutionary compromise in birth-canal design between having large heads and walking upright is for human babies to be born 3 months earlier than the equivalent developmental stage in other mammals. The infant is not really ready to leave the womb, and so the way to calm the infant is to re-create the conditions of the womb. He then gives 5 "S"s for calming: Swaddling, Shushing, Swinging, Sucking, and Side-lying.

The swaddling is really tight; Miracle Blankets are good for this. Shushing should be really loud; apparently it's very loud in the womb. Swinging doesn't have to be as gentle as you might imagine. For a while--and my son's reaction to any of this seemed to change every week--I could reliably calm him by first swaddling tightly, then swinging in a big arc in one arm, then gradually reducing the amplitude of the swinging.

My kid used to start crying unconsolably at 7pm sharp (we joked that she hated Alex Trebec) and wouldn't shut up until 11 or so. At almost exactly 12 weeks old it just stopped.
But during those first 12 weeks the only thing that seemed to work was sitting in the bathroom bouncing her on the knee with the hairdryer going full blast and me scatting bebop choruses (blues or rhythm changes; it didn't seem to matter which).

In my experience, the 5 "S"s work, at least on newborns. My daughter is now 4 1/2 months old and doesn't react to them as well. The little swaddling blankets feel like you're putting your child in a straight jacket, but for some reason they seem to enjoy them.

The other thing I do with my daughter is "pat her on the bum and show her something new." That's exactly the phrase I use when telling other people how to get her to be happy. She loves to look at new stuff, particularly strong straight lines.

When she was very small, I calmed my daughter (unless she was hungry of course) by wearing her in a wrap on my chest and just walk around. Walking seemed to work wonders. I also had a song I used to sing a lot already before she was born, so she knew it and recognized it -- it worked sometimes, but not for very long.

When she was really newborn her dad could calm her by letting her suck on the insides of his upper arms. A little strange, but it worked.

When she got bigger, closer to one year, I used to calm her down when she was upset by saying a lot of rhyming words. That seemed to be interesting enough that she just had to listen and forgot to cry.

I should perhaps add that I think we are biologically adapted to being carried. Also, being carried closely on the body mimics being in the womb a little bit.

It helps to get to know your kid. Some children are easily overstimulated and need a calm environment, some are easily understimulated and needs something new to happen now and then. My daugther is of the latter kind, and it showed very early!

Time longer car trips to match up with usual nap times. Also, riding on a road that has curves and/or ups and downs works better at soothing than straight, level roads.

Our daughter had colic in her earlier months, and the best soother we found was holding her snugly and dancing/moving to music with a good, regular beat -- she responded best to old-timey string bands and Celtic bands.

We did many of the suggestions above, including driving the kid around the block. One thing I used to like to do was to tickle my kids feet. The 'What the Heck Was That' expression on their was priceless.

The TV series 'Bones' has an excellent scene with Bones calming a baby in a car seat.

My nephew would calm down to the musical stylings of Hootie and the Blowfish. I share this with misgivings as I believe that 'lite rock' is banned by the Geneva Convention.

A friend introduced his toddler to Rammstein; the dancing to "Du Hast" was truly marvelous.

I have one word for you: laudanum.

A splash of JD in the milk also works. But not quite as well.

Better living through chemistry.

Both my infant kids could be soothed by about thirty seconds of low closed mouthed humming with the child held against my chest. I am a large chested male, so I can hum pretty low. All else coming up short, a car ride is fail-proof.

It really depends on the baby. Our kids were great car-sleepers, so long-ish drives were no problem. Actually the bigger problem is messing up their night-sleeping schedule the next evening. We tried to keep them awake as much as possible during drives that were longer than 5 hours or so.

Timing the drive to usual nap times is a good strategy.

If you have a multiple-day drive, the difficulty can often be not the car portion, but the motel room portion. I've actually taken the kids for a short drive to get then to sleep when we were staying in motels, then transferred them to their hotel beds/porta-cribs.

But some kids are awful in cars, and can't sleep. I'm guessing the opposite strategy might work better for them: time driving to match waking times. But I wouldn't actually know, since I've never had that problem!

For our daughter during her first few months, Norah Jones's first two albums were golden when she was fussy going to sleep (along with gentle agitation on my shoulder). (That's not a knock on Norah, btw, who I liked or I wouldn't have had her albums...it just seemed to work).