static cling

So, Dr. Harvey Karp tells us that babies like white noise, because apparently it's pretty noisy in the womb, what with all of the wushing blood and digestion and who knows what else.

And, since KJ and I are hopelessly cheap when it comes to things like this, we decided to forgo any fancy sound machine and just tune the radio to static.

For the first week or so, we had it tuned just off of a bizarro NPR station (which is a lot better than KQED), so I would wake in the middle of the night to Carl Kasell talking to me, or Michael Krasny kind of telling me what would be on that day's Forum.

Then, we somehow lost that station, only to have it replaced by a station that played popular indie rock and weird, crappy mid 90's music. Think Death Cab for Cutie followed up by the Goo Goo Dolls. It might be newborn-baby-sleep-deprivation speaking, but I kind of remember having a Decemberists singalong with Kevin. Then again, this really sounds like a bad party I might have attended.

Next came a pretty solidly static-y station, which was nice except for the night it mutated into some kind of semi-air raid siren. This little bit of audible pleasure occurred just as an unusually fussy baby was having his diaper changed. It turns out he was fussy because, in the moment it took me to find the "off" button on the stereo, Peter had managed to pee all over his face. Yeah, I'd be a little fussy too if I thought the Russians were nuking us and I had just peed in my eyeballs. Poor kid.

For about an hour we experienced the static station that played really bad jazz. Not even Peter appreciated that one.

Now, the station is pretty solidly fuzz. And it works magic, in ways I never would have anticipated. And...it's free!