When I was working in Room 105 with the wee ones, we had 2 mostly unscratched, somewhat useable nap appropriate CDs: Time Life guitar renditions of easy listening songs and Enya’s “The Memory of Trees.” I’m a huge fan of most things Irish or Celtic so I preferred Enya on repeat over guitar renditions of “More Than Words” and “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” playing continuously over two hours of napping. When I left CHCC in May I got a Beatles Lullaby CD as a going away gift along with “In the Night Kitchen” by Maurice Sendak. Musical and literary revolutionary, I was!

Anyway, the situation in 101 is pretty different. The lead teacher has amassed an endless supply of CDs, several of which are lullaby CDs. She does have 4 or 5 that she favors and they certainly aren’t bad. Sometimes I shudder at Michael Bolton’s rendition of Edelweiss, but only because it reminds me of a night where CB mumbled the tune under his breath spontaneously throughout the night. Funny? Yes. Annoying? Much more so than funny. Sometimes I cry at that Butterfly Kisses song (the cliche-ness of that song makes the sneering cynic in me a bit queasy, so don’t tell anyone that it chokes me up and makes me want to give my own dad a huge hug every time I hear it). There was actually one song that I insisted on looking up the lyrics for, simply because I could swear I heard the words “washing machine” in it and absolutely had to know the context of the phrase within a lullaby.
Suffice it to say, I am much more mentally stimulated by this naptime repertoire, in contrast to the prior routine tunes from 105. Interestingly enough, I noticed today, and not for the first time, that I keep hearing about cake in lullabies. In one of the lullabies (All the Pretty Little Horses)today I heard the refrain, “when you wake, we’ll have cake” and yesterday’s CD had a song (Fais Dodo) that said, “go to sleep, you’ll have a treat….mama makes a cake…”

Seriously yo, why are we bribing our children to sleep with cake? I find that to be a somewhat strange and sabotaging spin on the whole nap time concept. You sleep and we will feed you sugar laden , hydrogenated oil soaked blocks of artificial love. Damn.

Another thing that sort of impressed me was that everything I linked to here, I was able to find via internet just by entering a few lyrics I managed to remember into Google. I ♥ Google. I’m also going to openly praise my memory for random details. Mind you, I have absolutely no ability to remember anything important (see here), but when it comes to tiny, insignificant details, I’m a gleaming steel trap baby! Oh and yeah, so, like, if anyone knows a way to get paid as a freelance internet researcher, I think this post certainly gives a glimpse of some unearthed potential that is begging to be tapped.

No, really.