When Annamarie Saarinen needed to soothe her ailing daughter, she used a rattle -- downloaded to her iPhone.
Jeff Hilimire uses a white noise application on his phone to make shushing noises for his infant daughter. And Tracie Stier-Johnson lets her young daughters answer trivia questions on her phone while waiting in the doctor's office or at parent-teacher conferences.
'You can only play `I Spy' so many times,'' said Stier-Johnson, 40, of Racine, Wis., whose daughters like the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? game she loaded on her iPhone.
Parents have handed their cellphones to children as distractions since they were invented, and toy versions tap into kids' love of pushing beeping buttons and playing with electronic gadgets like the ones their parents have. But a mushrooming number of applications on smartphones has parents using them more than ever as modern baby rattles.
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