Eventually we decided that the little noise machine wasn’t loud enough. When we moved them into the cribs in their own room, we needed something that made enough noise to blanket out the normal noises of the house so we didn’t have to tiptoe around starting at 6:30. Rachel found a CD of white noise at Amazon, so we bought an iPod speaker dock, popped in my ancient 40 GB iPod, and put the white noise on repeat.

Of course, each white noise track was only ten minutes long, and the short pause while the track restarted used to wake them up. Luckily, I was able to stretch out the track in GarageBand, and produced an extended remix version that was three hours long.

So now we had our system: when the babies went down for their naps, we’d turn on the speakers and when they woke up, we’d turn them off. It seemed too much hassle to actually stop the iPod playing; sure it kept looping forever even while the speakers were off, but the power draw seemed minimal.

What may be obvious to you, but was obvious to me only in retrospect, is that endlessly playing the same three-hour track on repeat for four months might not be the best way to prolong the life of your iPod hard drive. So, yeah. That died yesterday. We’re trying this cute sheep out for now, but it seems to only work on a timer, and we kind of want something that will go all night. Anyone want to sell me an old iPod cheap? This time we’ll probably push pause every now and then.