The Snowflake Chronicles

de belles berceuses

1 Masa’il 163 B.E. - December 11, 2006 at 5:39:51 PM PST

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My Mother sang to me, not in the womb, but after I was born. The lullaby I remember was a Mother Goose rhyme. It went something like this

Rock-a-bye, baby
up in the tree top
when the wind blows
the cradle will rock
when the bough brakes
the cradle will fall
and down will come baby
cradle and all

I don’t know if Mom sang that one too me or not. I don’t remember Mom singing to me, but I know she did because she sang to my sister and brothers when they were still in diapers. My Mother didn’t favor one of us over the others, she loved us all equally, which is probably the reason my brothers and sister got to open one of their Christmas presents on my birthday.

I will say this, that unlike Mother Goose, my mother never put my cradle in a tree. In fact, I don’t think either my siblings or I had the type of cradles that rocked or even moved. I remember my sister or maybe it was one of my brothers’ sleeping in a baby bed. When Mom wanted the child to go to sleep she used a rocking chair. I remember her sitting in the chair, holding my sibling in her arms and rocking back and forth, while she fed him/her with a bottle.

My siblings and I were bottle babies, not breast babies. The bottles Mom used with my sister and me were glass. In fact, that’s how I go weaned, Mom got tired of me throwing my bottle out of the car window and breaking it. I guess after four or five times, the kid breaking the bottle it gets annoying.

I don’t think being bottle fed rather than breast fed screwed us up all that much. All though, one of my sisters-in-law did ask me once if my brother was breast-fed or bottle-fed, when I told her bottle-fed she got this weird look on her face and said, “Oh, that explains it.” I didn’t pursue the subject any farther, not that I can’t guess what she was referring to. It just seems strange to me, talking about things like that with relatives, even if the are only relatives by marriage.