When my daughter (child #2) was a baby, she was colicky and restless. How I remember staying up nights with that baby! We joke about it now, but it was during her infanthood that I started drinking coffee (before I’d been a tea drinker). I needed the caffeine to keep me going, because that baby slept for only 3 or 4 hours in any one stretch of time, up until she was about eight months old. It was, lol, a “nightmare.” But she was the cutest little baby so I couldn’t have possibly been mad at her. It’s just one of those things that’s part of being a mother.
I’d read back then that, to encourage restless babies to sleep longer and better, it helps to have a fan running or a tape recorder running all night. Here in Upstate NY where winters are bone-chilling cold, and especially in my drafty apartment, I couldn’t run a fan. And the tape recorder kept everyone else up. We settled on an old radio tuned into static, for the white noise. Unfortunately, sometimes the dial would slip or the radio transmission would change, and we’d hear the faintest strains of Ozzy Osbourne at night…
We’ve moved to a house in town, and holy cow this town is noisy. It used to be a quiet little town, but an ice cream stand opened up down the street and a gas station enlarged it’s business. And the car dealership down the road now deals in motorcycles. It’s really a pain. And I’m being very polite when I say that…
So we started our little “white noise” routine at night again. We have been using a little air filter. I don’t know if it was conditioning from those early years, but my daughter sleeps better with noise in the background, after all these years. And we no longer hear those deafening motorcycle mufflers at 2am. 
But guess what?! Our air filter sometimes picks up and emits radio signals. Maybe it is trucks with CBs driving by?! I don’t know. But I swear at night I sometimes hear men’s voices. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.
I just saw this website for White Noise Machine and guess what– they actually MAKE little machines for creating white noise. And all these years I’d been using the stupid radio and the expensive air filter! I’d much rather have a machine dedicated to white noise, to avoid those “slips” in transmissions where we pick up interference and start hearing the strains of “Stairway to Heaven” on FM. :S
P.S. The White Noise Machines also block snoring spouses. LOL! I won’t go into that; that’s content for a whole ‘nother post!
