The last thing John said last night was, “I love the man who invented that swing.”
I don’t want to jinx it, but our darling girl has given us much-needed 5-hour sleep stretches for the last three nights. Perhaps just as appreciated is that we can set her down into the swing before she’s asleep, and she’ll just look up, mesmerized by rotating leaves and birds, herself cooing away, as she gently drifts off into slumber.
The hilarious thing is that now we both associate the crooning of the swing’s mechanical-sounding lullaby with our own relaxation and sleep. As I hear it playing upstairs, I’m struggling to keep my eyes open.
Anyone who criticizes this device as being a non-human babysitter has clearly not known 10 weeks of continuous sleep deprivation. We are abundantly appreciative of its existence.
anna in med school 
Pavlov was evidently conditioning the wrong subject!
I knew a guy who knew a guy . . . well, anyway, it was during my time at Oberlin, which is both an academic and a musical place, and it’s a good story, so we’re going to say that it really happened. A trumpet student and his wife had a baby boy. The trumpeter wanted the baby to associate good things with nursing, so he used to play a certain famous and beautiful trumpet piece whenever the baby had yummy milk.
I assume that the baby grew up liking whatever piece it was. The story doesn’t say. Life went on, the mother weaned the baby, etc. Several months later, the mother heard the trumpet piece—and she got a let-down.
So be careful how you condition yourself!
Ha! Hilarious! Happy new year!!