Time was if you wanted white noise to put your kid to sleep, you had to run the vacuum cleaner, or the washing machine, or the dishwasher. Then some enterprising genius figured out how to make CD's of these same sounds. Then someone else--dozens of someone elses, apparently-loaded white noise generators onto a chip, and now there are ambient noise machines for every quirk and nursery.
Except gee, guess what, a study found they are too loud, too close, and in any case, that much continuous noise stunts the development of a kid's normal hearing. So scrap that crap and try something else.
Like move to a city where there's a steady thrum of traffic that lulls kids to sleep; works for us.
Meanwhile, in other white news, a Duggar-sized family of evangelical German homeschoolers will not be deported back to Germany, thanks to the same "prosecutorial discretion" tactics ICE uses when they don't deport brown children who were brought to the US by their freedom-loving parents. Living the American Dream of immigration reform for Europeans!
Infant sound machines could be dangerous to babies' ears [boston via dt freakout sr correspondent sara]
German home-school family will not be deported from US [bbc via twitter and sara]
