The Psychology of Mortimer

Tags

books, children's fiction, kids, mortimer, munsch, psychology, reading

One of my friends sent us Robert Munsch’s Mortimer as a gift when Owl was born, and it’s one of the only books that he actually listens to, rather than constantly interrupting the narrative by pointing and yelling shrilly, “A TRUCK!!”

PH and I read it differently, though, and it has led to discussions about Mortimer’s motivations.

We can’t really agree on just what Mortimer’s problem is.

For those who don’t know this classic tale, it goes thusly:

Young Mortimer goes upstairs to bed and is warned to be quiet. He responds with “Yes! Yes!” and then proceeds to sing so loudly and joyfully that he drives his family to distraction.

He is visited, in turn, by his irate father, by 17 siblings (Mortimer is actually a Duggar, I guess), and two police men. Each time he is scolded and told to quiet down, he is even more emphatic in his agreement to do so, yet his noise actually gets louder and louder.

Everyone starts arguing with each other about what to do with him and he eventually starts singing softly to himself and then drifts off.

How I See The Story:

As a dog trainer, I see this as a basic story of operant conditioning. Mortimer, as one of 18 children, doesn’t get a lot of attention and he gets so wound-up that he is willing to take even negative attention.

His bedtime antics are rewarded by the constant visits upstairs. Once the attention ceases (everyone gets wrapped up in each other), Mortimer slowly winds down and drifts off. When I read Mortimer to Owl, Mortimer’s “Yes! Yes! Yes!” has a casual tone, like “yeah, yeah, yeah.”

When he winds down at the end, I trail off and fluctuate my pitch, as if he’s a tape recorder that is running out of battery.

Perfect Husband reads it differently.

How PH Sees The Story:

PH sees Mortimer as a child who is sadly afflicted by some kind of mental disorder. He wants to be good but is simply unable to control his deep seated drive to create chaos.

When PH reads Mortimer, his yesses have a frantic note as Mortimer becomes increasingly intimidated by his scolders. Mortimer’s father makes him a little nervous, his siblings’ wrath en masse makes him even more desperate to behave, while the policemen send him into a near-grovel of promises to shut up.

However, no matter how much he tries, he just can’t seem to suppress the devil inside him who simply MUST MAKE NOISE. In the end, when he has wreaked so much havoc that flower pots are flying and the family baby is looking distinctly worried, Mortimer finally finds some kind of satisfaction in his soul.

He sings his song once more, quietly, but this time it has a triumphant note, and then he goes to sleep content.

We are each fascinated by the other’s interpretation. How can such a simple tale be told in such different ways?

So I went online to find out more.

I learned that Mortimer was Munsch’s first book, and that unlike many of Munsch’s characters, he wasn’t drawn from life.

I even listened to Munsch read the work, and his telling ran right down the middle between my telling of it and PH’s.

So we may never know what really makes that little bald kid tick.

But Owl seems to enjoy hearing the story no matter who is reading it, and maybe one day he can read it to us and give us his own interpretation.

I’m looking forward to that. Maybe it’ll give us insight on why our little noise maker won’t go to sleep.

If you read Mortimer to your kids, how do you tell the story?

I Keep Thinking He’s A Dog, But Owl Thinks He’s People

Tags

babies, child development, children, concepts, dog, experiments, generalization, learning, psychology, reading, symbols, toddler, words

Most of my experience with teaching and training beings whose brains are smaller than mine has been with animals. Furthermore, in most scenarios Owl acts and responds very much like a dog and so I treat him very similarly most of the time.

I use redirection, positive reinforcement, a high-pitched, encouraging tone when I deal with him, and it seems to work. He responds well to praise, touch, and food rewards. He likes to fetch.

He’s a puppy!

So I am amused and delighted when Owl displays human-like abilities that are beyond the grasp of the dogs I have worked with.

Like when he was 14 months old and I realized that he understood that he was looking at himself in the mirror.

Hi, me!

I pointed to his reflection and said “who’s that?” and he pointed to himself! To test his understanding, I secretly placed a banana sticker in his hair and showed him his reflection. Sure enough, his hand crept up to his hair while a perplexed look appeared on his face.

Dogs would NOT get that.

Also, I am constantly surprised by not only the extent to which he imitates us, but the extent to which he understands what he is imitating. Like at Hallowe’en, when he had just learned to walk, and he spotted a candy wrapper on the ground. He picked it up and toddled over to the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and proceeded to try and open it to throw away the wrapper.

A dog can learn to put something in the garbage if you teach him, but it would never occur to him to see something like a wrapper, identify it as garbage, and then try to throw it away himself. Hypothetically you could teach a dog to recognize certain things are garbage to be thrown away, but it would be a lot of work.

Your average dog does not watch you do something, intuit the intent behind your action, and then try to do it himself.

Owl does this every day.

I'll just slip these on...

Then there are other things that I almost don’t notice until I think about them.

For example, every morning I ask him to choose his footwear for the day. He can pick his wading boots, or his little doc-martin style boots. No matter which he chooses, he always brings me a matching pair. He has never brought me, say, one wader and one doc martin.

It’s the same thing when he brings me my own footwear (yes, I get my baby to fetch my shoes. I told you he is very like a dog…). He never brings me one sneaker and one boot. He brings me two sneakers, or two boots.

Again, a dog would have difficulty with that. He can fetch your shoes, but you’d have to formally train him to understand “fetch my sneakers” vs “fetch my boots”. It would take WORK.

But Owl does it as a matter of course. Humans are clever.

And the way he generalizes! I made the mistake of teaching my dog to chase my ex-boyfriend’s cat under the command “get the cat”. When I got my own cat, that command didn’t work, because he didn’t understand that “cat” meant any cat other than ex-boyfriend’s cat. We had to teach him our new cat’s name, instead.

But the baby understands categories easily. When he was 12 months old I could say “where’s Beloved Dog?” and he would point to Beloved Dog, meanwhile identifying him as “dog”. Ditto for the cat. He knew that we had A DOG and A CAT but that they each have their own unique identifiers as well.

We taught him what a hippo was, and from then on he could identify all sorts of hippos in all sorts of books, even drawn by different artists. No dog could do that!

"hippo" is one of his favourite signs

Then again, Owl’s capacity for self-control, maturity, patience, obedience, following basic instructions, and potty training are completely eclipsed by our dog, and certainly his capacity for destruction rivals any dog I have ever met.

So I am putting him to the ultimate test.

I am going to try to teach both dog and Owl to read.

Well, not READ.

At least, not as those who use the alphabet would consider to be reading (Owl is trying to teach himself the alphabet, but has difficulty after “D”…).

More… symbol recognition, like in Mandarin. I’m trying to teach Owl to recognize certain letter combinations as holding meaning.

I made Owl flash cards

some of his favourite things

I’m going to do the same with Beloved Dog. I borrowed flash cards from my friend and business partner who swear up and down that she has seen dogs learn to recognize words like “sit” and “down” and differentiate between them.

Just to be clear:

I am NOT pushing, pressuring, or otherwise making this un-fun for Owl. It’s just a game, something I am interested in to test his capacity for generalization and symbolic representation. I don’t believe that it will aid his development or help him school in the future.

I’m just pitting him against the dog.

For science.

(I’m so going to get trolled…)

Which one looks smarter to you?

Beware The Seahorse, Children. It’s All… Soporific And Stuff.

Tags

babies, childhood, conditioning, fears, psychology, sleep, weird

Okay, here’s where I explain the loss of the seahorse.

Remember the seahorse?

We really came to depend on that seahorse. During the whole Go The F*** To Sleep incident, Owl would often drift off to sleep staring dreamily at the seahorse’s glowing tummy.

When he started daycare, the seahorse went with him every day to help him go down at nap time.

Then, one Saturday a couple of months ago, Perfect Husband picked me up from work and told me that Owl was afraid of his seahorse.

“Don’t be silly,” I told him, “he fell asleep to it just last night – he just lay there and watched it until he drifted off, while I hummed in the rocking chair.”

“Well, he found it today and he brought it to me, so I turned it on for him, and he started to scream.”

“He must have just gotten a teething pain at that exact time. It must be a coincidence.”

To prove PH wrong, I turned on the seahorse and showed it to Owl when we got home that night.

…He took one look at his musical bedtime pal and burst into horrified, heartbroken tears, and ran off to find his Dada.

Monday afternoon, when I picked him up, Daycare Lady told me that Owl hadn’t slept. He kept standing up in his playpen an screaming in a heartbreaking manner which was entirely unlike him.

I couldn’t understand how he could have developed a fear of his seahorse literally over night, but it was looking more and more like this was, in fact, the case.

I asked Daycare Lady if anything bad had happened to Owl with the seahorse – maybe another child had thrown it at him?

No, she didn’t think so. She checked with her helper lady, and helper lady hadn’t seen anything like that either.

In any case, the next day he went to daycare without the seahorse and slept fine.

So I put the seahorse aside for a while.

I miss the darn thing because now if I want Owl to go to sleep without being on the booba, I have to sing “Mama’s Going To Buy You A Mockingbird” over and over and over and over again. I have had a sore throat lately and this ISN’T HELPING.

Besides, the music is soothing and I missed that, too.

In our organizing stint last week I dug up good ole’ Glowy again, and I offered it to Owl. It had been months. Surely… whatever it was that upset him about it… was forgotten by now.

It started well.

He seemed happy to see it and reached for it. He even pressed the belly to turn it on.

Words cannot express the look of betrayal that crossed his face when the music began to play.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME??

The crazy thing is, every time I turned it off, he’d go over to the thing and turn it back on. 

"hey, it stopped! Let's just press the tummy and..."

"ARGH OH NO, WHY??"

(click the pictures for close-ups of the agony)

"HOW CAN I BEAR THE PAIN??"

"Hey, I didn't say TURN IT OFF..."

Suffice to say we’re baffled.

I am Introvert, hear me speak in a reasonable tone of voice!

Tags

conversation, extroversion, introversion, parties, props, psychology, social skills, The Introvert Advantage

I am an introvert.

I am not shy.  I am not quiet. But I am very much an introvert.

It’s a personal pet peeve of mine when people use “introverted” as a synonym for “shy”. That’s complete nonsense. I’m not remotely shy. I am a chatterbox. I smile at people in the elevator. I am comfortable with public speaking.

In high school, when I went to “Dramafest” in Halifax, I wore a black knit hat with very large and colourful butterflies on it. When I was in university, people recognized me by my colourful wool “elf hat” which I wore through the winter. I also had an eclectic collection of scarves. I joined the improv group.

Nevertheless, I am introverted.

Some extroverts think that they are introverts, when really they’re just shy. Some introverts think they’re extroverted, because they aren’t shy.

Which are you?

Introversion is about what you find easy, and what you find difficult. Your average person finds going to parties to be easy, and studying to be difficult. I am the opposite. I would rather study for a difficult test all night than go to a party full of people I don’t know. And it’s not about shyness. It’s just that talking to people is hard work, whereas studying just takes a certain amount of concentration, which is fairly easy.

The introverted brain works differently. An introvert has more brain activity than an extrovert, which makes it sound like we’re smarter, doesn’t it? In fact, the majority of gifted children do classify as introverted, but being an introvert doesn’t necessarily mean you are smarter (nor does being gifted make you introverted).

Counteracting our high levels of brain activity is our slower method of processing. It takes introverts longer to process information than it takes extroverts.

This has several consequences:

1. Introverts contemplate their actions for longer before they actually perform those actions. In other words, introverts look before they leap. Introverts are the thinkers and philosophers of the world, but they might get eaten by a tiger while they think about what to do.

2. Introverts don’t converse as easily as extroverts do. It takes them longer to process what has been said to them and to formulate a suitable reply. This often results in introverts being somewhat socially awkward because they aren’t good at the witty repartee… one of the many reasons we hate parties.

3. Stimulation overloads the introverted brain much more easily. While extroverts leap around looking for something to occupy their swift but underused brains, introverts are trying to prevent a blue-screen-of-death situation in their overloaded mental processor. So while extroverts are off installing surround-sound systems and racing off to mosh at a concert, introverts are trying to hole up in their bedrooms with a book and some dim lighting.

Ultimately, extroverts are stimulation seekers while introverts are stimulation escapists. Since extroverts outnumber introverts by three or four to one, it means that introverts are seen as “weird” and get assigned labels like “shy”. After all, the only reason an extrovert would rather stay home on Saturday night is shyness. Shyness is a horrible affliction, in the eyes of extroverts. A shy extrovert is desperate for human company, but afraid to seek it. Very sad.

It is to this miserable state of being which most introverts are mistakenly assigned by misunderstanding extroverts.

In actuality, while shy introverts do exist, they don’t suffer much from it. They wouldn’t want to go to a party even if they were brimming with confidence. Talking to people, especially strangers, is simply hard work. Loud noise and flashing lights are unpleasant, overwhelming and ultimately exhausting. It’s not fun, if you’re an introvert. Fun would be a quiet night in with a couple of friends who are used to the odd way you phrase your sentences. Fun would be a hot bath, a cold drink, and a good book.

Introverts suffer through mixers and bustling night clubs the way that extroverts suffer through War and Peace.

In The Introvert Advantage, the author recommends using a “prop” to help make interacting with strangers easier. I totally use this strategy.

One of my favourite perks of being a service dog trainer was access to dogs who were allowed to go into public. I could take one of my dogs to the movies, to a restaurant, and to a party full of strangers.  I would be stopped again and again by curious strangers who wanted to know about the dog. This is not something you want if you are shy. But I am not shy. I am introverted. So I thought it was great.

A prop, like a cute Labrador or a funny hat or interesting jewellery, gives you something to talk about with strangers. Suddenly talking to a stranger becomes much easier. I had my service dog speeches down pat, and I rattled them off effortlessly when I was stuck talking to a stranger. Perfect Husband could have mouthed my answers along with me. Easy!

I miss having a dog always at my heels, but the Babby is proving almost as good a prop. I was at a baby shower yesterday, filled with people I didn’t know, but who wanted to talk to me about my baby. I wasn’t even exhausted by it, because Babby made things easy.

You can trust me, any party I’m invited to? I’ll be bringing the baby.

Much easier and less exhausting, that way.

One of my pre-Babby prop-babies, who I got to see at the shower yesterday!

The only thing that confuses me is this:

Babby seems to LOVE going out into public and being stimulated by others. He gets bored and fussy at home. Does this mean he is an extrovert?

Extroverted? Or just... not shy?

 

I’m an introvert. PH is an introvert.  How on Earth did we produce an extroverted child, and is this going to cause us problems later on?

Attachment Theory 101, Part The First.

Tags

attachment parenting, attachment theory, myths, parenting, psychology

I am somewhat ashamed to admit that until @NotMaryP over at Daycare Daze made this post, I had no idea that attachment parenting was so despised by the very people who practised it.

I read Daycare Daze specifically because I admire her excellent authoritative parenting style and wish desperately that I lived close enough to send Babby to her daycare when he is a year old. But I recently found out that to her, Attachment Parenting is four-letter phrase. Since my foundation is in Psychology and Biology, I learned about Bowlby long before I ever heard of Dr. Sears and so I missed the whole attachment parents = permissive hippies connection.

My understanding of attachment theory comes psych courses, rather than from popular culture.  I’ve always been a bit of a shut-in, so this isn’t the first time I’ve realized that I missed something big (I found out when I was 14 that there had been this guy named Kurt Cobain, who was now dead, and that his band Nirvana had started a whole movement called “Grunge” and I was like “What happened to the Beatles?”).

Apparently, to most people, “Attachment Parenting” as considered to be the name for what Perfect Husband and I call “Please Parenting” – the kind of parents who beg their tiny children to behave and alternately scold or coddle during tantrums rather than calmly enforcing proper boundaries.

Ironically, this actually violates attachment theory.

This is how I feel when I encounter Fundamentalist Christians. As a child, I learned about Christian forgiveness, about the dangers of wealth, and about accepting the differences of others. The fact that Christianity is now largely associated with Republican mysogynist, homophobic, and capitalist agendas baffles me… because it seems completely in opposition to the whole point of Christianity.

Daddy loves me, this I know

Now here I am, being told that Attachment Parenting is associated with Please Parenting, and I can only shake my head in disbelief.

So now I am here now to explain Attachment Theory and debunk this bizarre misunderstanding once and for all.

…at least, among the 200 people or so who happen on my blog every day.

TwiBash Part II: “New Moon”, New Psychoses.

Tags

auditory hallucinations, Bella Swan, books, characters, Edward Cullen, Jacob Black, literary analysis, literature, New Moon, psychology, psychosis, schizophrenia, Twilight

Oh. My. God.

It took a couple of false starts, but I did eventually get through New Moon. I’ll say the positive stuff first.

It’s better than Twilight.

Never mind that the list of books that are better than Twilight can (and does) fill entire libraries. It’s a start.

It starts out awful, continues awful, then Edward leaves and things get a hell of a lot better for a while. I almost got caught up in the story, until things devolved again with Edward’s return.

To summarize, the parts without vampires in them are almost decent.

Except for Bella, who continues to be

a) Stupid

and

b) Schizophrenic

Let’s start with the first point, shall we?

(Beware! “Spoilers”)

To Shut Up or Not To Shut Up: A Parent’s Question

Tags

attachment parenting, babies, dvds, friends, friendship, parenting, parenting styles, psychology, research, tv

When you have friends who are also parents, things can get awkward when parenting philosophies clash.

I have known since I was a teenager that I wouldn’t let my baby watch tv, and that I would use a diaper service, and that I would carry my child in a carrier instead of lugging around a car seat, and that I would breastfeed. They didn’t even feel like decisions. They were things I felt I knew about myself.

When I was getting my B.Sc in Psychology, I added things to my mental list of future parenthood.

I would practice attachment parenting, because I learned in Interpersonal Relations and Emotions classes how vital a secure attachment is to a person’s future happiness.

I would use babytalk (sorry, “parentese” :-p) with my baby, and sign language, because Psycholinguistics taught me that they actually speed up language development.

Watching a parent in a store, I would think about how I would deal with a discipline problem, using methods I had learned from Behaviour Modification.

Now I am a parent, and so are some of my friends.

And it can get awkward.

We see reflections of ourselves in the people around us

People feel very personal about their parenting decisions.

Everyone wants to be a good parent (I hope). No one wants to believe that they might be doing things wrong, and yet that fear lurks beneath the surface of every truly good parent. For that reason, people tend to get violently defensive of their own parenting techniques.

So I tread on eggshells.

I nod and smile when people suggest letting my baby cry it out, rather than lecture them about attachment styles. I downplay my use of the cloth diapers. Instead of talking to them about links to asthma, and low sperm counts, I tell them that “it’s laziness, really”, because the diaper service will deliver diapers to my house.

I don’t want to hurt my friends by suggesting that they did things wrong by letting their child cry it out, or by using disposable diapers. I don’t think they did do anything wrong. I just know I don’t want to do it.

Many of my friends are excellent parents whom I admire very much, and these little things are very minor in comparison to the many other things they do as parents that I wholeheartedly agree with. Some of them made those choices many years ago, when there was less information on the subject. So I don’t tell them why I make the choices that I make, in case they feel like I am lecturing them or implying that they did things wrong.

Doing this goes against my natural instincts, because I am a lecturer by nature. However, I was blessed with a friend of lesser intelligence when I was younger, and the hurt she invariably felt whenever I lost patience with her taught me the beginnings of self-censorship. I still don’t always know when to shut up, but I’m better than I used to be, and I know that parents don’t take lectures on parenting styles sitting down.

So I shut up, but sometimes it is really hard.

The other night, when a friend offered me her DVD for infants, which she referred to as “baby crack” I had to think fast to turn it down politely. I had an idea that a reflexive “Oh, HELL no, why don’t you just offer him some methamphetamines while you’re at it?” would not be a well-received response. This is a kind and intelligent person who doesn’t deserve that kind of rudeness.

I suppose I could have just accepted it from her and just never played it for Babby, but then she might have asked me how Babby liked it, and if I had been amused by it myself, and that could have started a whole web of lies. So I summoned every bit of tact I had and said,

“Thank you, but we have a DVD of original sesame street, and that’s enough for now.” I neglected to mention that there’s no way Babby is watching that before age two or three, either. I resisted adding that we don’t want Babby watching TV because pediatricians recommend absolutely no television before age two. I just said no thank you, and hinted that Babby was watching other things.

I feel bad, as if I had lied to my friend, because in a way I did lie. I misled her to think that I was not opposed to DVDs for infants, and that I had my own collection of such things. On the one hand, I spared her feelings and avoided insulting her own parenting choices. I feel that this was the right thing to do.

On the other hand, she babysits for us sometimes, and so I feel like I have delayed the inevitable… unless I want to take the risk that some day she will play “baby crack” for my own child… something I’m sure she wouldn’t do if she knew that it was against my rules. But if I tell her my rules, I’ll be risking making her angry and hurt.

What do you do, when someone suggests something for your child which violates your parenting beliefs? Conversely, what do you do if someone lectures you on your own?

I have some questionable parenting tactics myself

Overthinking Sleep Aids

Tags

anxiety, babies, books, classical conditioning, comfort object, cry it out, infant sleep, insomnia, lovey, music, no-cry sleep solution, operant conditioning, over-thinking, parenting, psychology, sleep, sleep routines

Hi, I’m Carol and I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

I am using the above as a disclaimer, because this is going to be some classic Carol inconsequentiality.

I’ve read and re-read (parts of) The No-Cry Sleep Solution and I am satisfied that it will meet my needs. As a dog trainer, part of me was hesitant about this book, because the one thing I couldn’t really by-pass in my brain was the little voice that says “cry it out relies on operant conditioning. What could possibly work that does not use operant conditioning, and consequently, CIO?”

After all, how do you teach  puppy to sleep in his crate? Let him whimper. The whimpering behaviour is not rewarded and he learns to stay quiet in his crate. Simple.

But Babby is a lot younger than a puppy. He doesn’t even have his milk teeth yet. If he were a puppy he’d still be snuggling at his mother’s nipples, not whimpering alone in a crate. A puppy, by the time it’s old enough to come home, is developmentally much more like a two year old.

So here I was, trying to find a way to violate basic principles of psychology, and feeling pretty stupid about it.

Then I read the book and wanted to smack myself for being such a moron.

CLASSICAL conditioning.

You know, Pavlov’s dog? Ring a bell and it drools? The form of conditioning that was “discovered” first and the principles of which must be thoroughly understood before operant conditioning (reward/punishment learning) can even be attempted?

FORGOT ALL ABOUT THAT.

The really stupid thing is that I have insomnia.

All the recommendations for people with insomnia are based on classical conditioning:

• Build positive sleep associations (don’t force yourself to lie awake and miserable because that will make you hate sleep more; just get up for a while before lying back down and trying again)
• Create a soothing bedtime routine (dim lighting, warm bath, quiet time with a book)
• Avoid doing things which aren’t sleep (or sex) in bed (so you don’t associate bed with homework, worrying, arguing, stress, etc – actually, I bet they’d rather you don’t have sex in bed either, but I guess they had to draw the line at certain practicalities).
• Etc

I even read Stanley Coren’s book about sleep years ago and he even talked about how the best way to get babies to sleep well was to build positive sleep associations.

Duh.

So, yeah, The No-Cry Sleep Solution tells you how to classically condition your child to fall asleep at certain sleep cues. She talks about bedtime routines (we have one, but it isn’t long enough), weaning baby off of the booba (a definite sleep-association which needs to change if the baby is to learn to self-soothe), and creating other cues that the baby associates with going to sleep, such as a “lovey” (don’t have) and special sleep sounds (we only have “shhh”).

I have been hoping and hoping that Babby would turn into a thumb sucker, but it just doesn’t seem to be happening. So I am still his nighttime soother and this results in him needing to nurse every time he wakes up. I know perfectly well that he’s not actually hungry, but he screams like a banshee without it. The author explains that Babby’s sleep association with booba is so strong that he thinks he NEEDS it to go back to sleep, which is a problem because people naturally wake up every couple of hours. Most of us just roll over and go back to sleep, but if you think you need a booba in order to sleep, you might get upset. She has some tips on how to wean him off of booba, namely popping the booba out of his mouth as soon as he starts to fall asleep, so the association at least doesn’t get any stronger.

In the meantime, I am to introduce a lovey to take my place as cuddle-object, and some cue-music. If I keep the lovey with us whenever he is nursed to sleep, it will smell like me and he will associate it with being nursed to sleep. If I play the same music every time as he is falling asleep, he will associate that with nursing to sleep. The goal is to get to the point where the presence of the lovey and the sound of the music kick-off the sleeping process, while I slowly reduce the amount of nursing he gets before sleep until eventually he falls asleep at the sound of the music/presence of the lovey.

While she never once uses the term “classical conditioning” or allude to Pavlov, her instructions are clear. Pair the conditioned stimulus (lovey/music/bedtime routine) with the unconditioned stimulus (however the baby normally falls asleep, i.e. on the booba) so that it is associated with the unconditioned response (sleep). Eventually, the introduction of the conditioned stimulus (lovey/music/bedtime routine) will result in a conditioned response (sleep). It worked for Pavlov in getting a dog to drool on command. It worked when I taught Beloved Dog how  to pee on command. Why didn’t I think of it as a way to get Babby to sleep on command??

All of this is totally psychologically sound, and now that I think about it, is more psychologically sound than the cry-it-out operant conditiong approach. After all, none of the insomnia tips I have ever read have said “cry frustratedly and miserably in bed until you finally fall unconscious.” So if they don’t recommend it for adults, why do we think it’s the best strategy for babies?

Anyhoo…

Because I’m me, and I overthink everything, I now need to pick exactly the right bedtime lovey and music. After careful examination of all Babby’s age-appropriate toys, I have selected our Eric Carle brand Very Hungry Caterpillar that we picked up in New York, and which you can find pictures of on my Flickr page. It’s a nice, long, huggable baby shape and I approve of its message.

For music, my only option is a hand-me-down lamb that my Boy Cousins used to sleep to, which plays Mary Had A Little Lamb with a wind-up key. Babby already enjoys this music box, although it’s a little sprightly for sleepy time. However, PH is worried about it because the toy is over 20 years old and has metal turn-key. It doesn’t look super safe for a tiny baby. Better for a slightly older child who doesn’t poke himself in the eye when trying to put something in his mouth.

So THAT sent us to the internet to look at other musical options.

Now. I could get a music box or one of those crib-aquarium things that plays music, and use it in combination with the caterpillar lovey, or I could get a glo worm or similar which is music AND lovey all in one.

I’m agonizing over it. Because I am me.

On the one hand, I like the idea of a combo-lovey. If he could trigger his own sleep music, that would be fantastic. Talk about self-soothing! 

On the other hand, I’m an old-fashioned gal and I’m not big on the lovey-needs-batteries idea. When I was a little kid I had (okay, still have) a blankie. My blankie didn’t need no stinking batteries. My blankie didn’t need no flashy lights. I like the idea of my child hauling around a Very Hungry Caterpillar which PH and I bought on our baby-moon in New York. Feels delightfully literary and there’s a family story to it. But it doesn’t play music or give off a comforting light in the darkness.

So, folks, what to do?

Low-tech but literary lovey and music box that I would need to turn on myself at night, or fisher price gadget that plays music for Babby when he hugs it?

The pathetic thing is that I won’t get really serious about sorting out Babby’s sleep associations til I have figured out this important issue.

Oy.