Soothing the Savage Beast

The following was originally posted August 13, 2009 at http://www.parentclick.com/BlogPost.html?id=1235

What's more annoying to a parent than an in-vehicle non-stop cry?

Anything? Grape juice on the carpet, maybe?

Of course, Crystal and I were a bit spoiled over the past couple of years. Riley and Jenna both were relatively good kids, though, didn't cry much, slept through the night at just a few months old.

We spent so much time counting our lucky stars that when we found out Crystal was pregnant with Mason, we hypothesized that our luck would end, considering he was the lone "surprise" of the three.

And boy, how right we were. He just passed the 7-month mark, and has by far been the loudest, angriest of the three. It's been especially true in the car, when of course we can't soothe him, pick him up, or even otherwise distract him now that he's in a full-sized car seat (rear-facing, of course).

Sometimes we get lucky and Jenna can get him hushed by playing with him or giving him a toy, but mostly she just pokes him in the eye or shoves her foot into his face, making long car drives, especially the relatively long commutes from Indy to Noblesville, pretty harrowing.

With Riley, fate had given us a free get-out-of-tantrum free card.

The Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line" hit theaters in the fall of 2005, prompting me to download a large block of Johnny Cash songs and burn them to a CD. I had the standbys: "Ring of Fire," "Folsom Prison Blues," "Cocaine Blues," "Wabash Cannonball," and even picked up his famed haunting version of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt."

As I listened to the songs in the car, I began to realize something pretty interesting and damned cool: when Johnny Cash was crooning away, Riley, about 6 months old at the time, didn't cry. As a matter of fact, many times if we didn't put the music on, he would start, only stopping when we turned it on, and if we turned it off or even down, he would grow agitated and cry more.

So we started to test. We tried a variety of other music, from Dave Matthews to the Dixie Chicks to whatever happened to be on hand, even trying simple radio music. It wouldn't work. But Johnny Cash was a flute entrancing a cobra.

And so it worked, almost infallibly, until Riley was about 1 (by which time of course the Johnny Cash mystique was replaced by a heavy sort of bitterness toward his music, since it played almost incessantly for that time.

It was about the time Jenna was born that we tried to mix things up a little. I introduced them to as many of the greats as I could: Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles. Bands I'd never really been exposed to myself, and Crystal certainly not (she grew up in a home where "oldies but goodies," and later the "rock n roll is the devil" church influence monopolized the airwaves).

I decided I wasn't going to limit them (save for, say, gangsta rap and country music, the latter I especially can't stand to listen to), and popped in "Crazy Train" for Riley, and he was in love again. Last summer, I rolled out "Iron Man" for, again, purely cinematic reasons, and Riley had yet another song (which for months he started with "Has he/wost his wife/has he/wost his/wost his/wife?"), and it was all Ozzy all the time for the kids.

Jenna never really expressed herself in music, feeling content to let her big brother pick the songs. But a few weeks back we downloaded "Baby Got Back" for the karaoke game "Lips" for the Xbox 360, and ever since Jenna has delighted in running around whichever public place we may be in, spitting her toddler version of "Baby Got Back" like a mini Sir-Mix-A-Lot.

In recent months we toned it down a bit, mixing a little Billy Joel into the mix, and Riley's latest is "We Didn't Start the Fire," which provides him lessons in both music and late-20th century history. It's the current song in heavy rotation in our car, and again gets me back to my youngest.

Last week it was the end of another long day, and we wearily packed the monkeys into the car, and they were pretty much all on the grumpy side of the day. Mason bawled as soon as we strapped him into his seat, and we feared another long, frustrating drive home. Riley requested "The Fire Song," and I, not wanting to argue or risk hearing him whining on top of Mason's, hit play, and something semi-remarkable happened.

Back seat silence. Instantly.

"We Didn't Start the Fire" looped all the way home.