Put A Record On: Lowering My Blood Pressure, Musically

As a lot of you know, I recently joined Marissa in momland and about three months in, I'm coming to you on ~three hours of sleep (hey, an hour for every month!) after a night with a generally cheerful, very gassy, huge baby. To say that it's been a struggle recently would be...putting it mildly; our little guy has also learned how to shriek in the last week or so, so I'm mourning several frequencies as well as lost sleep.

At the same time, I'm reading all this parenting advice about coregulation, and how you need to be able to manage your own emotions so you can "hold" your child's etc. — which certainly makes enough sense, though is difficult to practice on the aforementioned three hours of sleep (don't even talk to me about naps). Like, on one corner of parenting internet there's a lot of discussion of babies "learning to self-soothe," but as I understand it the more contemporary research suggests that they cannot physically do that consistently before even a few years old. So you (or I, in this case) have to do a lot of self-soothing so that you can then soothe them.

I haven't been listening to much music, because most of the time I'm either holding a sleeping baby or trying to coax him to go to sleep with lots of shushing. But I'm realizing I should be, because more than anything else there are songs that provoke a visceral, full-body exhale the second I hear them. They're beautiful or soothing or familiar or some combination of all three, and they instantly make me feel all the tension I've been holding as I let it go.

So I'm sharing some of those with you — a few have sort of explicit baby ties, but generally they're just bangers (if by "banger" I mean nice relaxing tune, which I do).