Breaking Dad #3

Breaking Dad 3

A friend of mine has a six week old boy, his second child. His daughter is two years old. Dad is always tired. So is Mom. Neither child is sleeping through the night. In an effort to soothe his older child, he tries to sleep with her on her baby bed but he doesn’t fit. If he leaves, she starts up again. And if she is sleeping, his baby is awake. It’s a nightmare of quick naps, thin patience and long cries. I can’t speak for the babies. 

He told me this with bags under his eyes and I laughed in sympathy.  Memories of warming bottles at 4am, of falling asleep on the couch with our first baby on my chest rose. If there was a peep out of the baby monitor, one of us would be ready. Honestly, it was usually Mom.  But there were occasions when Mom was simply too tired and it was up to me to step up to give Mom’s breasts and mind that little extra rest she so desperately needed. Sometimes we would play ‘rock, paper, scissors’ of who was going to get up. Other times, we’d both lie in bed pretending not to hear the baby monitor. We waited, hoped the baby would go back to sleep or the other would give up first and go feed the baby.

In the days it was not much better. Both the babies had troubles falling into a sleep routine, as did we. And they cried. Oh boy, did they cry. Bottles didn’t help, burping, changing, extra blankets, less blankets, pacifiers, rarely seemed to help. I’m sure every Dad and Mom can relate to that frustrated feeling of having done everything you can think of to quiet a screaming child and still the crying continues.

And then we found something miraculous… Baby Einstein DVDs.

Seriously, I don’t know the magic behind it but I believe those DVDs are the reason why many parents today are still together. Once we put a Baby Einstein DVD on and the little sheep or lion sock puppet appeared, it was library quiet. The kids would be memorized. There was no plot, no dialogue, just pictures of toys and shiny, happy people. For added serenity and sanity, the music is mostly classical music, from Beethoven to Mozart and those other guys... anyways, it's baby whisperer magic. Try it, get some sleep. 

Now some parents out there might be skeptical, they might be on the ‘no babies should watch TV’ train and think that I am simply bad parenting. However, this anecdote isn’t for those people. This is for those Dads (and Moms) who are at the end of their sanity, who are still trying to figure out how to make their babies stop crying. Do what you have to do. 

Admittedly, this is only one story of what worked for us. But for those Dads trying to quiet a baby at 4am and simply want some quiet, what do you have to lose? Go to the thrift store or youtube and find Baby Einstein. You're already not sleeping.