Lullaby

It's hard to tell if the kitty is happy or not. I do know that this little girl is beside herself with joy.

Miss Boo doesn't smile hugely on camera, but she glows on the inside.

As a baby, Miss Boo required a lot of our attention...especially at bedtime. She never wanted to go to bed on her own and boy could she scream. We were told to let her cry it out. I bet this person giving the advice didn't have one like our little girl. After 3 hours, we gave up. It was too hard on us, so I started dancing with her in my arms very slowly, in a rocking motion to a CD that Johnson & Johnson included in their baby wash, titled Lullaby.

I got exercise and she got sleepy and fell asleep. It was a combination that worked for years, even when I was pregnant with The Dude. I would sit in the rocking chair and rock her to sleep with lullabies playing softly in the background.

I don't know when we stopped using the CD. Probably around the time our little boy joined the family and we were so exhausted from the duties of a newborn and did the unthinkable...we put on a movie and let her fall asleep watching it. But, true to herself, she would force those little eyelids open to watch the very end of every movie. But...we were too tired to remedy the copout on our part.

We have been able to get her to go to sleep for quite some time without a movie and without a light on. And then for some reason she began to experience a reluctance to putting herself to sleep.

As I was cleaning out her tights drawer one day I happened across the CD and thought, Hey! Why not?! It worked before, why not again. I asked her if we could play her lullaby music to help her go to sleep and like the magic it was before, it once again became her soothing balm of Gilead. After 3 tracks she is out and all is quiet...

...except for the Dude talking to himself in his room. To each his own, but he puts himself to sleep with his stories and I am OK with that.