I find myself awoken this morning.
Not by the sound of my alarms, which were set for an hour later, but by the screeching of a child.
Upstairs they run a daycare and this kid is screaming "Maman!" as if the very horrors of hell have descended upon it.
I lay in bed considering a few things. Quite a few of them involved duct tape.
Finally I went up stairs to ask that they move the kid from the kitchen to a bedroom (since the kitchen is right over my room). Turns out the kid had a splinter...
So back down in my apartment contemplating how I could ensure silence in the future I was faced with the following problems:
1. The Universal Declaration of Human Right
2. The Geneva Convention (technically non-applicable, but you never know)
3. Child Welfare Laws
4. My need and desire to sleep. Specifically to wake up when I want to ensure that I get enough sleep.
Some of you might say: "DW why don't you use earplugs?". I do, when I don't need to be up at a specific pre-9am time. To make sure I actually wake up I rely in part on my alarms so that I get to where I need to be. If I wear earplugs I will probably sleep right through my alarms. So if the kids decide they want to raise the roof at say 7:30am and I want to get up at 8:30 am that day then I'm losing an hour (or more sometimes).
I considered using a pacifier and duct tape, but it was surely an illegal idea.
Then I thought about a noise cancellation room with all the foam. It would work. You make a noise cancellation room with a huge play pen in the middle the kids can't get out of. Whenever they decide to wail you put them into the room and wait till they pass out from exhaustion of screeching.
Everybody wins! The babysitters, me and the kids.
You see kids have this incredible capacity to forget anything that isn't in their current perception range. This means that once they fall asleep from screaming that they'll wake up and never know it happened, or more likely it'll seem like a long time ago and not worth concern, kind of like when you teach them not to shit themselves but they forget forcing you to repeat yourself over and over again for a while until it sinks in.
So once they've passed out, you go into the room and then transfer them into a comfy bed, thus they get their day's nap (two things at once!) and you can even give them a cup of warm honey water for their throats when they wake up.
Then again the idea of a babysitter saying to a noise machine (read: child) "Time for the ROOM!" sounds like something out of a horror movie probably doesn't have the best potential. Besides you'd need to sacrifice an entire room to it, granted for an excellent reason but still.
There had to be a better solution. Less horror movie and less space intensive.
The duct tape plus pacifier idea returned to me. I had discarded it because it would be illegal, but then it hit me. Practically speaking it works, and it does so by plugging the sound hole the kids are screaming from. All I needed was something localized around the child's head.
A box. Kids love putting boxes on their heads and imagine they're some kind of squash or something. So you could combine the noise cancellation foam and a box that fits over the kid's head. Make the exterior of hard but light foam and the inside with soft non-toxic foam cones (which not only blocks noise but also ensure air pockets and no choking to death) and you've got a winning product.
Imagine "Do you want to play with the magic box!" much better than the room tagline. Not only that, but because you only bring it out after screeching and all other matters have failed the kids might see the box as rare and thus valuable and actually just stop screaming anyway while they play with it. If they don't well they won't be as bothersome anyway.
So then anyone feel like becoming investment partners in the box venture?
This post has been edited by Darkwatch: 10 January 2011 - 03:35 PM