White noise

One of the arguments that Harvey Karp makes in his bestselling The Happiest Baby on the Block is that newborns are often calmed by loud shooshing sounds: by an extended Shhh, or even by a vacuum cleaner. Why's that, Dr. Karp? "The answer is," he writes on page 140, "this loud white noise imitates your baby's experience inside the womb and switches on her calming reflex."

For the last three years, L and I have lived in a river valley surrounded on three sides by busy highways. As a result, there's a constant white noise in the air about us: the tomato plants and rabbits and Japanese maples are all backed, whether we consciously register it or not, by the steady shooshing sounds of autos.

Today, late afternoon, we sat on the porch with Cleo for several hours, the invisible traffic whispered steadily. Did it resemble, as Karp claims, the sound of blood in the womb? I don't know. But Cleo slept happily for hours, in between nursings.