Parental Earworms

You know how sometimes you get a song (or worse, a bit of a song) stuck in your head, and it just goes around and around and around, over and over and over until you think you’ll lose your mind? Yeah, that’s an earworm.

Everyone gets earworms now and then. Before I had kids, they were usually bad 80s or 90s pop songs, triggered by some random word. For example, if I was helping my husband fix a loose board and he said, “Could you pass me the hammer?” a voice inside my brain would immediately sing, “Hammer Time!” Or if I was at the reptile house at the zoo and saw a chameleon, it would start singing, “Kaaaarma karma karma karma karma chameeeeeleon…” And naturally, any mention of something “in the air” and my little brain voice would start channeling Phil Collins: “I can feel it coming in the air toni-iiight, hold on!”

If they’re not pop songs from your youth, they’re often cheesy commercial jingles. See a robin hopping around in your backyard and you immediately have, “Red Robinnnn, yummmmm” on an infinite loop inside your head. See a sign in the grocery store advertising, “All Beef Patties” and what do you start singing? Yeah, you know. It includes the words, “special sauce” and “sesame seed bun,” doesn’t it. It’s often an ad from so long ago that you didn’t even remember that you remembered it. See a kid playing with a slinky and deep from the recesses of your brain comes the chorus, “A slinky, a slinky, for fun it’s a wonderful toy! A slinky, a slinky! It’s fun for a girl and a boy.”

But when you’re a parent, the earworms become both more pervasive and more insidious. First of all, you have the theme songs to every show that plays on any PBS station between 6am and 6pm. All parents who are reading this, tell me you’ve never had the following scraps of theme songs stuck in your head: “She went ‘woof’ and ‘bark’ and ‘rrrrr’;” “Everything…is so wond-erous…;” “And I wanna know everything now;” “Flying at the speed of sound, vocabulary that astounds;” “It’s electric! Oh-oh!;” “And I say, ‘Hey! What a wonderful kind of day…’;” or “Red and green and brown and blue, they’re the Really Useful Crew.” (For you non-parents and Luddites, these would be parts of the theme songs to Martha Speaks, Curious George, Sid the Science Kid, Word Girl, The Electric Company, Arthur, and Thomas and Friends, respectively.) And that is a mere sampling of the theme songs your brain has to draw from.

And don’t get me started on all the songs from Disney movies, from classic to contemporary. I must have over a thousand Disney snippets waiting to get stuck in my brain, from the ones everyone knows like “Someday My Prince Will Come” and “Heigh-Ho” and “Hakuna Matata” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (which I am delighted to say both that my spellchecker recognizes and that I spelled correctly on the first try) to the less familiar “We Are Siamese If You Please” and “Feed the Birds” and “When I See an Elephant Fly.”

But even beyond the kids’ show theme songs, you have the endless nonsense songs your parents sang to you, that THEIR parents sang to THEM. Nursery rhymes like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or “Little Boy Blue;” silly songs like “On Top of Spaghetti” and “Found a Peanut;” “learning songs” like “The Alphabet Song” and “Ten Little Indians;” lullabies like “Hush, Little Baby” and “Rock-a-bye Baby;” and other random snippets like, “Clean Up, Clean Up” and “Brush-a Brush-a Brush-a.”

These earworms might be annoying, but I find that they do remind me of one very important thing: I sing to my kids. A LOT. I sing songs that they love and learn, songs that someday they’ll sing to their children, and that THEIR children will sing to THEIR children. So it’s not an earworm, it’s a legacy. Because after all, what else can you do with an earworm besides pass it along?

The Ultimate Earworm. You're welcome.

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Ever notice how children, especially babies, are completely fascinated by each other? When we’re out for a stroll, Ryan pays no attention to people walking dogs, but if someone has another baby in a stroller or a toddler alongside, he’s rapt. He reaches out to touch other children in a way he rarely reaches for adults. He seems to recognize the kinship, the sameness, of shared babyhood.

And older children are just as fascinated with babies. In a world where everyone is bigger than you, is allowed to do more than you, is ABLE to do more than you, it must be a powerful feeling to find someone who’s littler and more restricted than you. So it came as no surprise when my college friend Suzanne came to visit with her three young daughters that Ryan was an absolute hit.

The girls were all eager to hold him, feed him, cuddle him, and coo to him. They were fascinated to watch him bounce in his jumperoo, curious to see him play on his tummy, and delighted when he laughed at their antics. And he reveled in their attention! He spent the entire dinnertime bouncing in his chair, watching the girls eat their dinners, pausing every now and then to listen to the unfamiliar childish voices, and giggling at the faces they made for him. Mommy, Daddy, and Auntie Suzanne were just taking up space, for all he was concerned. He had found some new friends who were not quite as much bigger than him as most people he meets, and he didn’t want to miss a moment of their company!

He’s still developing a personality, so he can’t look for friends who are similar in temperament to him. He hasn’t figured out how to do much yet, so he can’t look for friends with similar hobbies or interests. But he’s little and curious and cute as a button, and he’s managed to find some new friends who have that in common with him.

The Soundtrack of My Life

I grew up in a musical family, always surrounded by every kind of music imaginable: classical, folk, Broadway, movie soundtracks, children's songs, and hymns. My dad listened to the Limelighters and the Kingston Trio, my mom listened to Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky, and they both listened to Rodgers & Hammerstein and Lerner & Loewe. And the whole family sang in the car: Found a Peanut, Amazing Grace, The Beer Barrel Polka, The Oscar Meyer Weiner Song. So it's not surprising that I usually have some song or another running through my head, and often coming out of my mouth as well.

It would be an interesting study to try to analyze what triggers a particular song for me. Sometimes it's obvious, especially with theater songs - a word or phrase in conversation echoes some lyric and I break into that tune. For example, if Herb says, "The trouble with the world today is that politicians don't listen to each other," I would naturally break into a chorus of, "The trouble with the world today is plain to see: it's coffee in a cardboard cup!" Or, to use a more well-known example, if he said, "The weatherman said the sun is supposed to come out tomorrow," I'd break into a chorus of - well, you all know what chorus I'd break into.  

Sometimes it's obvious if you know what I was listening to earlier in the day. Bits of commercial jingles from a few hours ago often slip into my thoughts, or a song I heard on the radio. So when we see the guy up the street walking his Newfie and Herb remarks, "That dog is just GIANT!", I might break into "One eight hundred fifty-four giant, done right, done fast!", or if he asks if I know a certain phone number, I sing, "Eight six seven five three oh ni-ee-eye-ine!" Even a bit of news can put a song in my head - after hearing of the death of actor Robert Culp yesterday, I found myself singing, "Believe it or not, I'm walkin' on air, I never thought I could feel so free. Flyin' away on a wing and a prayer - who could it be? Believe it or not, it's just me!" (That's the theme from "The Greatest American Hero", for those of you who missed the 1980s.) But sometimes, I just don't have the faintest idea where the music comes from.

Yesterday, when Ryan was so fussy, I was rocking him and singing every song that came into my head, trying to calm him. His favorites seem to be Papa's Gonna Buy You a Mockingbird, I'm a Little Teapot (although it must be sung in 3/4 time - and no, I have no idea why or how I even discovered that), and There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly (mostly for the "wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her" part, complete with wriggling, jiggling, and tickling). But when I've gone through those to no avail, I simply start singing whatever comes into my head. Yesterday, those three standbys were followed by The Itsy Bitsy Spider, There Were Three Little Ducks, and Old MacDonald (when I got to a verse about llamas, I knew it was time to move on - but believe me, Old MacDonald had QUITE the interesting farm yesterday!), all to no avail. But then, for no reason I can possibly fathom, I began humming the theme song to Mission: Impossible. Dum! Dum! Dah-dum! Dum! Dum! Dah-dum! Doo-doo daaaaahhhh, doo-doo daaaaahhh, doo-doo daaaaaahhhh, doo-doo! And it worked like a charm.

And come to think of it, considering how fussy Ryan had been all day long, that particular theme song was exceptionally appropriate. Jim Phelps might even have had to think twice about taking on a mission like that.

Sing, Sing a Song

I've always been surrounded by music. I could sing as soon as I could talk, maybe sooner. I have in my head a repertoire of music ranging from high opera (believe me, you don't want to hear me sing that) to the lowest of doggerel (come to think of it, you probably don't want to hear me sing that, either). I have so much of it in my head that I don't even know what's in there. Every now and then I break into some random ditty and then think, hm, didn't know I knew that song. And over the past few months since Ryan's been on the scene, my brain has dredged up more silly children's songs than I ever knew that I knew.

There are, of course, the classic lullabies: Hushabye Baby, All the Pretty Little Horses, Hush Little Baby (although I'm still not sure whether the looking glass is "brass" or "crass", not that either one makes an awful lot of sense). There are a few less well-known lullabies that require me to make up a few missing lyrics, like All Through the Night: "Sleep my child and peace attend thee, all through the night. Guardian angels God shall send thee, all through the night. Something something something something, God to earth is now descending. Childhood's dreams are never-ending, all through the night." I know the first two lines are right, I haven't the faintest idea what the middle part is, and I made up the last line just so it rhymes at the end. So far, Ryan hasn't seemed to mind my edits.

A much more fun category is all those repeated, building verse-on-verse songs, like There's a Hole in My Bucket, There's a Hole at the Bottom of the Sea, There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Spider (Ryan's favorite, mostly because of the "that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her" part), and One Elephant Went Out to Play. The latter is especially useful because there's no limit to the number of verses you can sing. It's like 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, only in reverse and somewhat less annoying. As long as you can count, you can keep adding elephants. My record so far is about twenty, but I can picture going up to at least 50 in the future.

Then we have the plain old silly songs, like Hickory Dickory Dock, Chim-Chiminny, and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. The nice thing about most of those is they're so nonsensical that no-one even notices if you make up some words because you can't remember the real ones, or create a few extra verses on the fly. Seriously, if someone doesn't balk at the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, are they really going to question your lyrics?

All the songs I've mentioned so far are songs that I learned and loved as a child. But I have a confession: I have another whole stash of children's songs that I picked up in my adulthood, not by babysitting, but by the guilty pleasure of having listened to a children's radio program called the Playground for the past few years. It features wonderful songs like I Am a Pizza, What Kind of Cat Are You?, and the Day the Moose Got Loose. (And less wonderful ones like the Hamster Dance and the incredibly annoying Pokemon theme song, but we'll ignore those for now.) Kids today have the benefit of not only classic children's performers like Raffi, Wayne from Maine, Laurie Berkner, the Wiggles, and Lois, Bram and Sharon, but many performers who don't sing specifically for little ones but whose music is endlessly entertaining for them anyway, like Weird Al Yankovic and his classic song, The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota. And endless a cappella groups with unforgettable hits like Liposuction and My Underwear Kept Ridin' Up My Rear (I don't plan on introducing that one to Ryan any time soon, but I'm sure he'll discover it somehow anyway). If you're creative and keep your ears open, there are endless songs all around that are a delight to sing to a child.

And speaking of singing to a child, I'd better wrap this up. There's a certain young man upstairs who's looking forward to hearing about a little duck with a feather on his back.