Gamifying baby sleep

I have a 5-month old, who needs to be rocked to sleep. The rocking can take anywhere between 10-20 minutes. It is easy to get anxious and frustrated and think, “Why does it take so long!” or “Why doesn’t he go to sleep already?”, especially when this happens in the middle of the night.

So, I came up with a simple technique to gamify this. I count in my head in blocks of 10 seconds, so “1 wolverine, 2 wolverine, 3 wolverine….”. As soon as I finish a10-second block, I cross off imaginary Tally marks in my head. Surely enough, this makes the 10-20 minutes much more manageable since I’m only thinking about the existing 10-second block.