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.

A Day in the Life

When his daughter was not quite a year old, Herb made a video he called “A Day in the Life of Rosemary”. He started with footage of her waking up in the morning and caught ordinary moments throughout the day (eating breakfast, playing with her toys, climbing the stairs, etc.), and ended with tucking her back into her crib that night. Nothing unusual or spectacular, just ordinary happenings on an ordinary day. But it’s a tape he’s watched over and over during the past 17 years.
So today, we’re making “A Day in the Life of Ryan”, trying to capture all the wonderful little moments that we see every day. But naturally, he’s not quite having his usual day today. For example, nearly every morning he wakes up at 6:30 or 7 and sings and plays in his crib for half an hour or so before going back to sleep for another hour or two. So Herb had the video camera ready outside the nursery so he could sneak down the hall at Ryan’s first peep and capture those moments before he went back to sleep again. And at about 6:30, we heard a little peep and Herb immediately slipped down the hall to grab some footage. But the little stinker didn’t sing or play or even wake up! He just went right back to sleep! So we stayed in bed for a couple more hours and then when Ryan STILL didn’t wake up we got ourselves dressed and ready for when he finally did. At 9:15, he finally started to stir a bit, so Herb got some footage of him waking up and playing (a little), but none of his usual singing. Oh, well.
He did cooperate nicely at breakfast, doing his usual staring out the window or across the room while he absent-mindedly opened his mouth so I could stick in the spoon. He was quite distracted by the camera, though, so a lot of his staring across the room was really staring at the camera, but at least that was similar to his typical behavior.
He also cooperated by playing very happily with his toys in his playpen. He pulled himself up and made one of his toys play music by spinning its wheels and whacking the little animals so they would light up and roll balls around. He spent quite a bit of time rolling balls down the ramp of another toy, even chasing after the balls when they rolled into the corners of the playpen and behind other toys. He did a bit of cruising around the playpen wall and grinned rather charmingly (and proudly) at the camera when he finished.
He was somewhat less cooperative when he started climbing the stairs and I called Herb to get some footage. As soon as the camera (and Daddy) appeared, he was much more interested in that than in showing off his stair-climbing prowess. Eventually he was willing to at least stand up and hang off the banister, but it was obvious that stair-climbing was no longer at the top of his interest list. And of course, after hanging on the banister he managed to fall over and clock himself on a side table next to the stairs, so we managed to catch the “drama of the day” on film, as well.
Once he settled down from that little injury (although I suspect the insult to his pride was the larger problem), he was willing to have a bottle and snuggle with Mum for a bit. He was still pretty sniffly so I took him out to sit by the pool and get some fresh air, which always seems to calm him down. I think we may have caught some sweet (if not typical) footage of Mummy singing lullabies to the koala boy. Unfortunately, instead of falling asleep, he got his second wind and then wanted to march around the house again.
After a bit of marching, a bit of crawling, and a bit of ball rolling, he seemed sleepy again, so Daddy took him upstairs for a nap, which is where he is right now. Only he’s not napping, he’s standing against the bars of the crib, chewing the top rail and bouncing up and down. He’s not yelling, though, so I’m not complaining.
So the video we make may not be a typical “day in the life” after all. But then, how often do we really have something that could be called a typical day? Maybe the fact that it’s not a typical day makes it a typical day after all. Just one more of life’s delicious little ironies.

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.