Dear Past Me: Just Buy the Damn Baby Shusher and Go to Sleep

Dear Sarah from exactly six months ago,

It's 2:14 AM in your sister’s guest bedroom. You're wearing Dave's oversized Villanova hoodie that has a suspicious hardened crust on the left sleeve, and you're literally lightheaded from blowing air out of your teeth. You're dizzy. So dizzy. Because you've been manually making a loud "SHHHH" sound for what feels like three consecutive hours while bouncing your brand new nephew in a desperate, knee-destroying sway. You confidently volunteered for this night shift because your kids are 4 and 7 now and you forgot. You completely forgot the sheer, unadulterated panic of a newborn who simply won't stop screaming.

You idiot.

Buy the machine. Just open your phone with your one free, cramping hand and buy the dedicated baby shusher. Do it now.

Why the hell does this sound actually work?

I remember when Leo was a newborn and Dave thought buying a sound machine was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard of. He was like, "I'm not paying thirty bucks for a piece of plastic that makes a noise I can make with my own mouth." But Dave isn't the one waking up at 3 AM, is he? Dave can sleep through a literal fire alarm. Dave once slept through a dog throwing up on his actual foot. So we ignore Dave.

The thing is, you physically can't make that noise loud enough or long enough to actually put a hysterical infant to sleep without giving yourself an oxygen-deprivation headache. Your mouth gets so incredibly dry it feels like you've been eating sand. You need the machine because the machine never needs to stop and take a breath or take a sip of lukewarm coffee.

As for why the baby shusher sound is practically magical, Dr. Aris—our pediatrician who has the patience of a saint because I used to call his emergency line crying about the exact shade of mustard in Leo's diapers—explained it to me once. I always pictured the womb as this serene, quiet, spa-like bubble where the baby just floated peacefully. But apparently, it's not. It's incredibly loud. Dr. Aris said it's basically like living inside a running dishwasher at a crowded nightclub. There's all this blood swooshing through arteries and intestines gurgling and your heartbeat pounding right in their tiny ears.

So when they come out into our perfectly quiet, dark, aesthetic nurseries, they absolutely freak out. It's terrifying for them. That loud, rhythmic shushing noise triggers some kind of primal calming reflex because it mimics the heavy blood flow they were listening to for nine months. It's biological witchcraft, basically. Anyway, the point is, they need the noise.

The aggressive butt-patting technique

Before you get the machine delivered, you're going to have to do the manual work, which involves this bizarre method I read about in some sleep book at 4 AM when I was losing my mind. You're supposed to put them down "drowsy but awake" which is a massive lie told by people whose children are already in college, but you just try to aggressively pat their little diaper butt in this weird tick-tock rhythm while simultaneously making this loud hissing noise directly in their ear until one of you passes out, usually you.

It's an entire aerobic workout just trying to keep the rhythm going while not dropping your cold coffee or crying onto their soft spot.

Speaking of things getting covered in bodily fluids, my nephew was wearing this Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit from Kianao that night, and honestly, it's fine. It has those envelope shoulders which means you can pull it down over their body instead of pulling a poop-covered collar over their head when there's a blowout, which is obviously necessary. It stretches well when you're wrestling a screaming infant at dawn, and the organic cotton is supposed to be better for their skin or whatever. But honestly it's just a bodysuit and it's going to end up in the laundry pile with the rest of the spit-up clothes.

If you're currently panic-scrolling the internet looking for anything that might make the newborn phase one percent easier, just go browse Kianao's baby essentials collection and add whatever you need to your cart so you can stop thinking about it.

Please don't blast this thing directly into their little ears

Here's the one thing Dr. Aris got very serious about when I asked him about sound machines. You can't just strap a speaker to a baby's head. "Loud enough to soothe" doesn't mean treating their crib like a front-row seat at a Metallica concert.

He told me their little eardrums are super fragile, so you've to keep the machine at least seven feet away from where they're sleeping. Like, all the way across the room. I used to put ours on top of a giant pile of clean laundry that I was never going to fold, which sat on the chair in the corner of Leo's room. It's close enough to fill the room with sound, but far enough away that it's not going to cause permanent hearing damage. And obviously, never put the actual plastic device inside the crib with them. Blankets, toys, loose cords, sound machines—none of that crap goes in the crib. Ever. Just a firm mattress and a swaddled baby.

Eventually, they wake up and need entertaining

The cruel joke of the fourth trimester is that once you finally figure out how to get them to sleep with the shushing and the swaddling, they wake up and realize they've hands. Then you've to actually entertain them during the day so you can drink your coffee before it turns into iced coffee.

I absolutely refused to buy those giant, plastic, neon light-up monstrosities that look like a carnival exploded in your living room, so I got the Rainbow Play Gym instead. It's wooden and aesthetic enough that I didn't mind tripping over it for six straight months. The little hanging animal toys are perfect for when they start doing that uncoordinated, jerky batting thing with their fists. Maya used to lay under there and just stare intensely at the wooden elephant for like twenty minutes at a time, which gave me exactly enough time to unload the dishwasher and stare blankly at the wall. It’s a lifesaver.

Just wait until the teeth come

Look, Sarah from six months ago, I know you're tired. But the newborn sleep deprivation is just the warm-up act. Because right when you think you've a handle on the sleep schedule, the teeth arrive.

When Maya cut her bottom teeth, she turned into a tiny feral beast. I tried everything. Frozen washcloths, wooden rings she just chucked directly at my face, those weird mesh bag things filled with frozen fruit that instantly turn into a sticky nightmare. Nothing worked until I bought the Panda Teether. I don't know if it's the little bamboo texture on it or the flat shape, but she would just aggressively gnaw on that panda's head for hours. We genuinely lost it under the passenger seat of Dave's Honda for three days once, and those were the darkest days of my parenting life. I had to do an emergency tear-down of the car, digging through old french fries and dog hair just to find it. It's 100% silicone so I could just chuck it in the dishwasher with the coffee mugs, which is the only way I clean anything anymore.

Motherhood is just a series of finding the one specific gadget that stops the crying, losing it, crying yourself, and then buying a backup.

So buy the shusher. Buy the teether. Drink the coffee. It gets better, I promise. Now stop reading this and go to sleep before the baby wakes up again.

If you need more aesthetically pleasing things to throw your money at while you're awake at 3 AM, check out Kianao's full collection of sustainable baby gear and just add to cart.

My deeply personal, highly unscientific FAQ

Can I just use my phone instead of buying a machine?
I mean, you can. I did this for a week. But then your phone is trapped in a dark room with a sleeping baby, which means you can't text your husband to bring you snacks, you can't doomscroll TikTok while you're pumping, and if someone calls you, the baby wakes up screaming. Plus, the phone speaker sounds kind of tinny and metallic. Just spend the money on the actual device.

Is the shushing supposed to play all night long?
Usually, the devices that make the specific human "shhhh" sound have a timer for like 15 or 30 minutes, because it's meant to break a crying spell, not be a permanent soundtrack. Once Maya finally stopped hyperventilating and went to sleep, I'd switch on a regular, boring continuous white noise machine (like rain or a fan sound) to keep her asleep all night.

What if the sound makes my baby cry harder?
Oh god, this happened with Leo the first few times. Sometimes you've to make the sound slightly louder than their crying to basically shock them into hearing it. If they're screaming at 80 decibels and your machine is whispering at 40, they literally don't even know it's on. Turn it up until they pause to listen, then slowly turn it down as they calm down.

When do you stop using it?
Whenever you want. The aggressive shushing is really a fourth-trimester trick for the first 3 or 4 months. By the time they're rolling over and grabbing things, they don't really need the womb replication anymore. Maya just transitioned to normal white noise, and honestly, Dave and I are so conditioned to it now that we can't sleep in a hotel without playing a fan noise on our iPad.

Is it okay if I just absolutely hate the sound of it?
Yes. It can be incredibly grating. It sounds like an angry librarian is trapped inside a plastic tube. Dave used to put a pillow over his head when I had it on. But you know what's more grating? A baby crying for two hours. Pick your poison.