My oldest boy has a white noise machine in his room, to help him sleep. It has a large selection of sounds that can be played as background noise: static, ocean waves, frogs, music, etc. The one and only sound that he will let me play is: crickets.
So he goes to sleep listening to the soothing chirps of crickets every night.
Well, it’s late summer in the Midwest, and the actual crickets are EVERYWHERE.
Last night, the kid came into my room at 4am.
“Mom,” he says, rubbing his eyes, “I can’t sleep.”
“Why?”
“There’s a cricket in my room, and it’s chirping and it’s keeping me up.”
So, being the caring and dutiful parent that I am, I follow him to his room where I proceed to tear it about for the better part of 20 minutes looking for this cricket.
In the kid’s defense, there is actually a cricket in his room. I can hear it. I just can’t find it.
I suggest turning up the volume of the crickets on his sound machine, so that they might blend in with the actual cricket in his room?
He says no.
I admit defeat and manage to get the kid to agree to try and fall back asleep, even with the cricket noises.
The irony here is, of course, that this is the same child who needs cricket sounds to fall asleep. Apparently, when it’s an actual real life cricket, well, that’s just too much.
