Price: $18.46

This is my second discovery from myself and Heather’s weaning week. I normally shy away from anything with the word “celtic” in it. Not that I’ve got anything against Irish music - I could sing you ballads all night long (or could have once, fatherhood hasn’t been kind to my memory) - but “celtic” makes me think of … well, druids and healing crystals. And Enya. So I was half expecting New Age renditions of Danny Boy, but happily I got almost the exact opposite - honest-to-goodness performances of some really top-notch Irish/Scottish music I had (mostly) never heard before. The tunes are not strictly lullabies, but they - songs and traditional dancing music both - are all quiet and soothing and I guess babies don’t care about strict definitions one way or the other.

My favourite tune is called “Goodnight and joy”  - it seems to be a variation on the well-known “The Parting Glass” and it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck every time I hear it. The other highlight is a jig called “The Dove’s Return” played on harp which is … well, I hesitate to use the word “magical” because the word is almost as suspect as “celtic”, but really it is magical - plus it’s got pretty much the perfect rocking-to-sleep tempo and rhythm and on a normal night it’s rare that Heather makes it to the end awake.

Highlights aside, this is consistently good all the way through and I’d recommend it to anyone. Like Asian Dreamland it performed well in rigorous field-testing, and it has the added benefit, on account of the music being so good, of being inclined to distract you from the fact that you’ve been pacing the floor half the night and have to go work in 3 hours. A sanity saver.

Price: $18.46

I mentioned before that I was planning a week of nightshifts in order to wean Heather off feeding at night. It didn’t go exactly as planned, as things were going crazy in my dayjob so I had to drag my spaced-out head in there each afternoon. It did, however, actually kinda work - before the week the latest she had arrived in our bed for the night was 2.45am, and now she’s getting to past 6am about half the time and she doesn’t look for milk if she does wake (which is usually because she’s teething - hurry up and grow, teeth!). Not exactly perfect, but a great leap forward nevertheless.

Anyway, in advance of the week, I stocked up on lullaby records and this is one of the best. The majority of the music on here is Japanese, but there’s also tunes from India, China, Tibet and Tatarstan (a republic in the Russian federation). One thing that really surprised me is how accessible the Japanese music is. The singing and the instrumentation can be pretty oriental-sounding, and perhaps it’s just the fact I’ve listened to this so often now, but if you changed the arrangements and had someone sing them in English I don’t know if you’d guess where the music is from.  The Chinese and Indian tunes, on the other hand, you can spot a mile off - the former in particular really evokes  the Chinese countryside, or rather my imaginary version of of it, complete with paddy fields and terraced hillsides and peasants in conical hats. Considering the closest I’ve been to China is watching “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” I suppose that might not correspond too closely to reality.

It’s hard to pick stand-out tracks. I love the Tatar Cradle Song, “Kokoro Ni Dakarete” from Japan and the Chinese one, but really it’s all pretty much perfect lullaby music - sparse arrangements, gentle singing and slow steady rhythms. I’ve given it some fairly extensive real-world testing during my nightshifts, and it’s performed well. It’s not a magic bullet - one night Heather didn’t close her eyes once from midnight to 3am, and slept only fitfully thereafter - but even so it got me some sleep that I wouldn’t otherwise have got, both helping to calm Heather down and keeping her asleep when she had finally drifted off, and it’s still one of my go-to albums on  teething nights.

Price: $16.41

At 11 months, Heather still hasn’t slept through the night ever. The best she’s ever done is go to sleep around 8.30pm and wake up at 2.45am … and then wake again around 4, and again around 6.30. It’s become a bit wearing - despite usually managing to kinda doze through the night’s action, I’m pretty bug-eyed at this stage and Niamh (still breastfeeding) hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in nearly a whole year so I can only imagine what she feels like.

Anyway, so I’ve booked a week off work to do the nightshift - my thinking is that if I make sure Heather doesn’t get fed at night maybe she’ll eat more during the day, and then won’t wake so much when nighttime comes around again. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? I don’t know, it’s the only idea I have and I’m terrified we’ll end up like our neighbours whose youngest woke every night until she was 5. FIVE! So reasonable or not, I feel compelled to try it.

In preparation for the week off, I got some new lullaby albums and I’m working my way through them and trying them out to see how effective they are. This one is a collection of lullabies and lullaby-type music from around the world - there’s tunes from 14 different countries on four continents, including Indonesia, Russia, Cuba, Congo and Ireland. Like Disney’s Lullaby Album it’s performed by real musicians but this is a lot more stylistically varied, as you might expect given the variety of origins of the music.

There are some real treasures on here, like the lovely quiet piano of “Itsuki no komoriuta” (from Japan), the ghostly family singing on “Sofdu Únga Ástin Min” (Iceland) and the strangely Irish-sounding “Tumbalalaika” (Israel). My only quibble is every tune slows down right at the end, which messes with my rocking-to-sleep rhythm - I know, I know, it sounds daft, but you’ll forgive me for being a tiny bit irritable in the small hours of the morning. Also I tend to skip track one, a Bobby McFerrin tune that’s just too New Age-y for me. Overall though it’s lovely, with a slightly melancholy early-morning feel that I really like.

So does it work? Well, we tend to use lullaby music mostly in emergencies these days, like for example yesterday when we had neighbours and relations over for a barbecue in the afternoon - at 9.30 pm Heather was still wildly over-excited, wouldn’t drink her milk and seemed intent on shouting “BEA! BEAAAAAA! BEEEEEEAP!” over and over for the rest of the night. I put this on and by track 6 she was quiet and calm, and Niamh fed her and put her down with no further fuss. Phew.

Price: $15.04

Most lullaby albums I’ve come across contain “music” played on artificial instruments that sound as if they’d been put together by a computer programmer rather than a musician - and, in actual fact, most of them have (thanks to MIDI which, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a way of storing instructions to a machine to play notes). I don’t know whether the target audience (i.e. infants) actually cares (even though I like to think that they do), but in real life grown-ups end up listening to these CDs along with their kids and the experience quickly becomes wearing.

This album, hooray for Disney, is different - there’s a list of twenty-two musicians on the inlay card. The instruments (piano, strings, guitar, flute, oboe, etc.) are real, the arrangements are lovely and the playing is beautiful. Quiet, soothing, instrumental music, suited perfectly to a quiet evening in front of the fire for adults as well as to easing a baby’s journey to The Land of Nod. The tunes are mostly familiar - nursery rhymes, some Disney favourites like “When you wish upon a star”, a Lennon/McCartney number and of course Brahms’ lullaby - which adds to the overall comforting vibe.

But, says you, does it work?

Well, the first time I tried it Heather fell asleep before the end of track 2. Subsequent experiments haven’t always been so successful, because her big sister likes it too and is inclined to “do quiet dancing” around the kitchen when it’s on. This, as you can imagine, is a bit of a distraction, but when I shoo Isabelle away a handful of tracks almost always does it, and even one or two often calms Heather enough for me to put her down in the cot without her objecting and let her drift off on her own in silence.