Baby Cries and Lullabies

Twice last week, my normally cheerful son had two panic attacks in the car. And I mean total panic, not just some regular crying. I don’t know if he saw something scary out the window, or if he just had really bad gas. Either way, he freaked out and I found myself singing “The Wheels on the Bus” over and over again until we got home. This always calms him down, and it reminded me of a long ten months ago, during his first few weeks on this earth, when he cried a lot.

You see, when my son was very tiny, he would scream every single time we drove somewhere. It was awful. I would get two minutes down the road and he would wail as if he were being tortured. I would pull over every 10-15 minutes, until I figured out that singing almost always stopped the screaming. And so I sang. And sang and sang.

The problem is, I don’t really know that many baby songs. I started with “The Wheels on the Bus” because it was the first one that popped into my head. But after a few verses, I couldn’t think of what else was on the bus… the wipers go swish swish swish, the horn goes honk honk honk, the rain goes pitter patter pitter, the change goes clink clank clink…

If I paused for even a second to think of what else to sing, he would cry again. So I improvised. Oh hey! Now we’re on a bus in Panama! The dogs go woof woof woof, the chickens go cluck cluck cluck, the pigs go oink oink oink.

And there I was at the stoplight, singing at the top of my lungs about pigs on a bus, feeling pretty ridiculous. But it worked.

This happened to me again when I was bored of my regular lullaby and tried to branch out to other songs that I only vaguely remember. I started with “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Simple enough. Except that singing one verse over and over is really boring, and we have this toy that sings “Twinkle Twinkle Firefly” to the same tune, so I thought I’d give that a try. But of course I didn’t know the words, so I just made it up:

Twinkle, twinkle firefly, up above me in the sky…. Lalalala firefly, pretty pretty firefly. Twinkle twinkle firefly, twinkle twinkle firefly.

Inspired. You’d think I was a writer or something.

So I tried singing the mockingbird song (see, I don’t even know the real song title). I could only get as far as “momma’s gonna buy you a billy goat” before I got stuck.

What comes after billy goat? And if that billy goat won’t… I was stumped. What? What does a billy goat do (or not do) that would make me buy yet another thing for this little baby? And why does this baby need mockingbirds and diamond rings and looking glasses to hush and go to sleep? Jeez, high maintenance baby.

And that was the end of that tune. I still don’t know what the billy goat does or doesn’t do. So now I’m back to lullaby and goodnight… hmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmm hmm hmm.

But hey, it works.