SimplyRain: The Next Best Thing to Silence

Silence is golden, but most moms don’t get to experience it too often. In fact, if you’d ask a mom to describe her day in terms of decibel level, “jackhammer” would be an understatement.

While I no longer have noisy toddlers, my house is routinely filled with sixth-graders playing Nerf basketball, a middle-schooler who likes to watch football games with the volume turned up, a husband who likes to watch horror movies with the volume turned up, and (on weekends) a mother-in-law who likes to watch NCIS with the volume turned up.

All that volume can make me crazy, though others in the house don’t even seem to notice it. And while it may seem counterintuitive to add to the sound level, I’ve found that sometimes it helps me to do just that—but not with any old noise. The key here is “white” noise, and what works for me is the sound of rain.

Rain isn’t noise to me at all; it’s music to my ears. SimplyRain provides three ways for me to enjoy that music, which has an almost-immediate calming effect. It’s not adding in more noise to the cacophony that is my house; it’s adding a layer that muffles the other sound sources while still allowing me to be able to hear the rest of my household in case someone needs me. Or the dryer buzzes. Or the phone rings.

It makes a nice backdrop for prayer time as well; sometimes I find music distracting, since I always want to sing along (or conduct an imaginary orchestra.)

You can download a FREE Thunderstorm mp3 file that plays for 60 minutes. There are other downloads as well, for a shareware “tip” of your choosing. This is an excellent and very portable option.

You can open SimplyRain in your web browser. Use the slider at the top to regulate the storm’s intensity and the larger slider to adjust the volume. You can even turn thunder on and off, as well as set the volume to oscillate, just as a real storm would.

You can download the SimplyRain app for iOS or Android and use it right on your phone or tablet. It’s priced at 99-cents and works just like the web-browser app without requiring you to use your data plan to access the rain if you’re not home. It also works on iPod Touch and, unlike the web version, has a sleep timer (love that feature!)

This app lets me tolerate SportsCenter, NCIS, and The Walking Dead much more gracefully than I would otherwise. As a sanity-saver, it was well worth the $1 investment.

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