After three mind-numbing months of failed sleep, Rani, Liam’s blessed Tamil nanny, intervened. She tied an old, green cotton sari to a wooden ax handle, added a spring at the top for a bit of bounce, suspended the contraption from a branch of the magnolia tree in our front yard, and laid the baby inside, hammock style.

I spied through the leaded glass windows of our front door as Rani gripped the rope suspending the hammock — called a totil — and swung it forward and back. As the momentum built, she flung Liam up, perpendicular to the ground in front of her, and then plunged him back down on alternating sides of her body. Rani reminded me of skiers dodging moguls in the Olympics, only this athlete wore a daisy-print sari and hurled a tiny, green cocoon around her in a blur of centripetal force.

When I suddenly remembered the little larva inside that cocoon was my baby, I gripped the door handle, ready to intervene, but then I heard something I had never heard from Liam when he was exhausted: Silence. Only the cicadas hummed in the yard.

From that day forward, Liam was a certified hammock sleeper. Rani insisted that totils were only for daytime naps — certainly not to be used at night when, in her view, babies should be snuggled safely in bed with their parents — but having failed at her prescription, not to mention back sleeping, we were desperate. So, instead of listening to Rani, we showered her with unwanted praise and rigged up a hook in our bedroom where we could hang the magical sleep machine at night. Our baby would finally sleep like a baby.

Well, kind of. For a while, Liam agreed to one nap a day with Rani, because she was willing to swing him in the totil for over an hour until he fell asleep. But our nights were punctuated with regular nursing breaks every two hours, after which Liam expected to be agitated back into unconsciousness.

Around five months of age, Liam started waking up for the day at 4 a.m. I realized we were in bad shape, that we were just conditioning our kid to associate sleep with perpetual oscillation. Moving him to the terra firma of his unused crib and letting him cry it out was the obvious solution, but with my nerves so frayed from exhaustion, I couldn’t take a full night of screaming. So, I caved. Halfway through each night, I relocated from my bed to a comforter on the cold floor under Liam’s totil. I alternately dozed and batted at the baby hammock when he whistled every 20 minutes for rocking service.

Thus humbly situated and desperately sleep deprived, one morning I hallucinated that we had installed a pulley system in our bedroom rafters to swing our addicted child from the comfort of our flannel sheets.