On A Starry Night

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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.