A wet and extremely windy Monday morning here at Lullaby Lu today – with that wind the cradle will have most definitely rocked and fallen out of the tree, baby and all…

The Anatomy of the Lullaby

So did you see it?!  The One Show on BBC1 a week last Friday showed a five minute piece on the anatomy of lullabies!  What better way to promote your business than to have the likes of Alex Jones and Richard Mainwaring waxing lyrical about the benefits of the lullaby as a sleep aid!?  We made sure we made the clip available on our Facebook page so if you didn’t see it just click through to our Facebook page here and you can have a look…One Show – Anatomy of the Lullaby.

It was really interesting to watch, and to summarise, the piece looked at what makes a lullaby a lullaby and culminated in Richard writing his own lullaby and trying it out on a group of mothers with young babies.  What happened?….  Seven out of the ten babies drifted off to sleep!

Of course, in the run up to the ‘lullabython’ they looked at the history of the lullaby and what it is about them that helps babies and children sleep.  I would posit here that it probably doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get to the bottom of this one – a 3/4 time signature gives melodies a ‘swinging’ quality (we all like the garden swing to ourselves on a warm spring day right?  Or a sneaky turn on the kids rope swing in the park that looks eerily like a spider’s web…sooooo relaxing!), and we rock our babies to sleep quite frequently, or use a rocking motion to soothe and calm.  The melodies themselves are soft, simple and often repetitive, and Alison Street (early childhood studies lecturer called upon to assist in the ‘deconstruction of the lullaby’) suggested that falling melodies may be particularly effective as they would echo the soothing sounds that we use to calm our babies.

The Lullaby Lyrics

Perhaps the lyrics are not as important as the soft, rhythmic qualities of the lullaby’s melody – it is hard to say.  When looked at by Alison and Richard on The One Show Alison highlighted that many lullabies eluded to life’s hardships of the time, making lullabies a sleep aid and also a kind of musical therapy for the adults!  Suddenly ‘Rock a Bye Baby’ makes a little more sense, if indeed it came to exist through a mother’s musings on the cruelties of life!  But perhaps not the angle we want to take when singing to our own children….We use lullabies from when our children are babies right through to when they are little people who understand the English language – there is nothing more counterproductive than singing a lullaby to a child that makes them sit bolt upright, wide-eyed with fear and beg to know why baby plundered to an inevitable end while being rocked to sleep in a tree.  ‘Oh, well, you see darling…..’ – yep, no way of sweetening that one…..

But at Lullaby Lu, we make EVERY element of the lullaby as important as the next, because we know that our lullaby packages are not just gifts, they are tools, they are functional, and they need to focus on YOUR child and your child only.  So not only do we create beautifully soft and soothing melodies, and even create your own melody if you choose to go bespoke, but we write lyrics that bring sleep time right down to just you and baby (we opt to leave out the horrors and hardships of every day life, because we just don’t like singing about those at bed time….).  The lyrics are warm, loving, and of course include your child’s name which makes the lullaby a personal and intimate experience.  Our lullabies aren’t just to listen to, they can be learnt and sung by mum, dad, sister, brother, granny, granddad, baby sitter….making them even more special with the sound of a familiar and comforting voice.

We’ve Said it Before – but we Think we Make the Perfect Baby Gift!!!

Yep, with this latest coverage on lullabies, and looking at the packages we offer, we feel even more positive that our lullabies make such a personal and unique gift for babies and children.  Do you see how?  Come and look, come and listen – we just know you will love them.  Listen to our bespoke lullabies