Had a vivid flashback the other day to the very first weeks of being a new dad, and my memories of baby’s sleep (or lack thereof) and feed routines.
What brought me right back to my early days as a father was hearing Mozart on the radio. Mozart was our saviour when it caming to giving our baby a routine at night.
Getting baby to sleep at night and introducing an evening routine in those first few weeks was the one thing that most parents find the toughest challenge – we were no different.
My first thought was to get the bath routine, but when our daughter was very young she found the bath experience a bit upsetting, and probably overstimulating too. It certainly did not calm her.
So the next thing was to try music, and in a master stroke of genius I remembered a CD my wife had bought me for a previous birthday – Mozart for Meditation.
We introduced the Mozart CD every evening when our baby was being fed before bedtime – if my wife was breastfeeding or I was feeding a bottle of express milk.
The idea we had was by letting our baby hear the same music every night before going to sleep, she would associate it with that event and fall asleep more quickly with music.
I will not say it completely solved our sleep problems, but this music definitely calmed our daughter down, which made the evening routine much easier to deal with – not only that, the music definitely calmed Mum and Dad down after a long tiring day too!
One things for sure, exhausting as those first couple of months were, I will always have Mozart as an evocative reminder of that very special time as a newly made Dad, getting to know my daughter for the first time.
