Little Lamb, Who Made Thee?

I'm constantly amazed at how hi-tech baby toys are. We went shopping a few days ago. Jenny has had her eye out for a certain traditional wooden children's toy -- the kind that's been around for centuries. We had to search it out among aisles and aisles of plastic multi-colored gadgets that blink, vibrate, & play music or animal sounds. We already have several such toys in our house, but the cranky luddite in me always rises when I'm confronted by so much gadgetry. The greatest minds in human history did not hear classical music from their stuffed animals! Lights did not flash on their playmats! Their chairs did not vibrate! Brilliant children once grew up without a single AA battery!

So I had mixed feelings about the lovely stuffed lamb that Oliver's grandmother gave him. It’s about his size and comes with 4 buttons on the back that play synthesizer versions of the following sounds: a heartbeat, whale song, rain falling, and ocean waves crashing (ironically, it makes no lamb sounds). We tried turning it on and setting in on Oliver's lap. He didn't mind, but the thing seemed to smother him, and I thought the whale song sounded a little creepy so the lamb went back on the shelf.

Flash forward to last weekend, where Jenny and I were still contending with our most prolonged parenting dilemma yet -- sleep. You see, from the day he came home from the hospital, we've been practicing the “family bed” plan, with Oliver asleep between the two of us. We're not thrashers, and it was a good way to feel he was safe and close -- not to mention it made frequently feeding him easier those first months. But getting him to sleep has always involved us rocking and bouncing him, and most often, he's ended up asleep ON TOP of one of us, and we'd do our best to sleep beneath him, feeling more and more like letters beneath an ever heavier paperweight.

As time went on, it became clear that none of us was sleeping well and we made the decision to finally move him to the crib. We really expected it to involve a lot of fussing and thrashing, but it didn't. It seems Oliver needed his space, too. We got him to sleep and gently placed him in the crib, in a sleep positioner (which we call “the taco") that keeps him comfortably on his side. And to lull him to sleep, we brought in the lamb, whose gentle synth heartbeat lulled the baby to sleep. It worked surprisingly well!

We're not close to sleeping through the night yet, but this is another step forward for all of us. Thank you, little lamb.