Mom's Lullaby

It evolved quickly. The key elements: a schedule that worked for the whole family, not just the babies. The belief that babies could learn to self-entertain if encouraged to. And the decision to involve her older children in their care.

"I put them in the bouncy seat and said, 'Nobody hold the baby except when I say it's okay,' " she recalls.

She learned that if she slowly stretched out the babies' feeding schedule, they would adapt. She learned that if she didn't pick the babies up the minute they cried -- if she tried to nudge them toward self-soothing -- that eventually they would learn to do it. It was a radical change from the way she interacted with her first-born, Camilla. Camilla got picked up the moment she cried. She was constantly entertained. She could be -- she was Giordano's only child at the time.

"I carried that child until she was 4," Giordano says of Camilla. "Everybody gave in to her. Everything I've learned, I've learned from my own mistakes."

She and her husband (they divorced five years ago) came to the United States in 1990, shortly after her brother, Carlos Moleda, a Navy SEAL, was shot while on assignment in Panama City and lost the use of both legs. He was recovering at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and her family settled in Northern Virginia to be close to him.

At one point, about a year after her arrival, her brother mentioned that he had a friend struggling with triplets. The family had lots of staff, lots of help, but nothing seemed to be working. The babies didn't sleep well. Moleda asked his sister to go visit, to help. She fixed the problem within weeks. That family told a friend, and then they told a friend, and 14 years later, the whispers are stronger than ever.

Systemic Help

Booking Giordano is like getting into the best day-care centers: one must call the minute there is evidence of a zygote, if not sooner.

"Let me see, I called Suzy -- " Shipman begins, only to have Carney interrupt her.

"Were you pregnant yet?" he teases.

"Yes, I was pregnant!" she says. "Around two months."

Now, Giordano comes three nights a week (Wednesday, Friday and Saturday), or, as Shipman puts it, "just when you think you're going to kill each other or your toddler."

"I had a hard time turning people down, so I got my mom involved," Giordano says, "then she got booked, so I got my sister involved, and she got booked . . ."

At this point, Giordano has a whole team: mom, daughter, sister-in-law, close family friends. Still, she is continually turning down clients because she simply doesn't have enough time. Partly because of that, she and one former client, Lisa Abidin of Annandale, have just completed a short book outlining Giordano's system. ("Teaching Babies to Sleep 12 Hours by 12 Weeks: A Step by Step Recipe for Baby Sleep Success" will soon be available for purchase online at http://www.babycoach.net/ .)

"It's not me," Giordano swears. "Any parent can do it. It's like a cookbook: If you follow the recipe, I guarantee it will work."

With her first child, Hugo, Shipman actually did a little recipe-following by accident. A good friend of hers with newborn twins had hired Giordano, and she quoted "Suzy's rules" to Shipman like gospel. "At five weeks, do this!" she told her. "At x number of pounds, do this!"

"And I just did it," Shipman says.

Shipman also called Giordano for a phone consult about Hugo's napping issues. When she heard Tia Cudahy, a close friend, was pregnant with twins, Shipman immediately urged her to call Giordano.

"We're lucky that we didn't have to kill each other over Suzy," says Shipman, whose daughter was born a little more than eight weeks after Cudahy's twins.

Cudahy went to Giordano with reluctance. With her firstborn, Eleanor, Cudahy and her husband, Redmond Walsh, had done it on their own until Cudahy returned to work after maternity leave. And she loved it. But twins and a toddler? She was torn.

"With Eleanor, I was a baby-hog -- I liked doing it all myself," Cudahy says one evening, sitting in her kitchen in Georgetown. "But when I knew it was twins I realized I needed help, and I needed systemic help."

So Cudahy and Walsh decided to hire Giordano a few nights a week -- a few nights that quickly morphed into nearly every night for nine weeks. Cudahy is aware of the perception that might leave to outsiders. She understands the kind of criticism expressed by people such as Brazelton, who suggested that the full-time use of Giordano "keeps parents away from their babies at a time when the babies really need that bond."

"When people first began to talk to me about Suzy -- insisting I needed to call her, that she was the best, etc., etc., I resisted," Cudahy wrote in an e-mail this month. "I had this idea in my head that she was some sort of celebrity baby nurse, or was the baby nurse of choice for the pampered set."

What she found was something quite different.

"I'm not the type of person to say -- let alone to feel -- that this person is a part of the family," Cudahy says. "But Suzy has become that. She is so supportive, and she just believes in the best in everyone."

Across the kitchen, her husband nods his agreement. And upstairs, three children -- twin boys and big sister Eleanor -- are all fast asleep.

Night Watcher

In the darkness of the Shipman-Carney house in Washington's Foxhall neighborhood, Giordano is standing over baby Della's bassinet, watching her sleep. It is not late yet, only 10:30, but the night's work has started. The child is perfection: smooth skin, raspberry lips, a delicate thatch of dark hair. One hand is lost inside the still-long sleeves of her nightshirt; the other curls gently, as if, in dreams, she is grasping her mother's finger.

She wiggles. Little noises escape her -- one tiny "eh," then another. It has been 4 1/2 hours since Della's last feeding. To wake now would not be unexpected. Della's approaching 9 pounds, but not quite there yet; she still gets fed when she wants to be.

Giordano looks down, waiting, watching. Is it time to soothe her with gentle words? To pat her softly, to delicately move the blanket? Della opens her mouth again and closes it without a sound. Her chest rises and falls almost imperceptibly. She is not ready to leave her dream world.

"Look at her," Giordano says in a whisper. "Ahhhhh.''

And in the stillness of the house, where two parents, one toddler and a tiny little baby are all tucked in to sleep, hers is the voice of contentment.

"Don't I have the best job in the world?"