Parenting

Blender Baby Hack Is Proof Exhausted Parents Will Try Anything

by Mike Julianelle
Updated: 
Originally Published: 

Desperate parents lose minds and bounce baby to sleep with KitchenAid Mixer

When you have a baby, there is nothing you won’t do to protect it. There’s also nothing you won’t do to get the thing to shut up and go the f*** to sleep. A parenting hack making the rounds online is proof of that.

Someone posted a gif to Imgur of what kind of almost seems like an ingenious way to get your baby to sleep, until you think about it for a few seconds and it’s pretty clear that the risk probably outweighs the reward.

But oh, what sweet, sweet reward.

http://imgur.com/virJreJ

The post is proof positive that it’s sleep deprivation, not necessity, that is the mother of invention. Because whoever came up with this baby hack was equal parts brilliant, desperate, and insane.

Look, clearly it’s not the world’s best idea to attach a sleeping baby to an electrical kitchen appliance, no matter how well the mixer, combined with a white noise machine, lulls your newborn to sleep. It’s the kind of thing that seems like a great idea until it suddenly becomes the world’s worst idea. Hopefully this little nugget’s parents will come to their senses before it gets there, and assuming they do and nothing tragic comes to pass, can we kind of hand it to them for a second?

Let’s see what the famously mild-mannered Reddit community thinks.

This guy is going straight for the parent-shaming.

This next guy clearly has the latest kid fad on the brain.

And this comment includes some actual facts.

Don’t go thinking Reddit has lost its edge. There are plenty of cringe-worthy comments on that post that no one needs to see — especially not new parents. Although if you’re considering using this KitchenAid hack, maybe they’ll scare you straight.

I have a 16-month-old. I just put him down for his nap, which, thankfully, seems to be sticking. But that’s not always the case, and it certainly wasn’t always the case when he was three, six, nine months old.

My wife and I cried it out, we’ve done a little co-sleeping, heck, we’ve even taken the kid for a drive just to get him to stop crying and finally shut his stupid, adorable, inexplicably wide-open eyes.

We never attached him to any appliances, but in the middle of the night, during particularly brutal stretches of sleeplessness, in our darkest hours, you’ll consider almost anything. So I don’t judge. Desperation and sleep-deprivation are a dangerous combination, and sometimes what seems like ingenuity might actually be kind of insane.

Kudos to these parents for thinking outside of the box, but here’s hoping the little bit of sleep they were able to snatch when they made this gif has them thinking a bit more clearly and they put that mixer back in the kitchen.

This article was originally published on