mama monday: children’s music

We don’t listen to a whole lot of children’s music in our home. Don’t get me wrong – we all like and enjoy music, and who doesn’t love shaking your hiney once in awhile? But children’s music just doesn’t do much for us, in general.

I play piano (not so well anymore), and Ryan LOVES to play with me. He thinks it is so cool to sit on Mama’s piano bench and reach WAAAYYY over there to hit the low notes and then WAAAYYY over there to hit the high notes. His train table is in the same room as the piano, so often while he’s playing choo-choos, I’ll play piano.

Tony plays guitar. And boy-oh-boy does Ryan like to play guitar, too! Tony is great at making up words to “our” kind of music, so he’ll often sing crazy songs about Ryan to the tune of an Everclear song (eg, "Pale Green Stars") or something. Very creative, my hubby.

Ryan and I listen to a lot of music in the car. Some of our favorites are Jack Johnson (who doesn’t love the banana pancakes song? We sing that on the weekends while I make - you guessed it - banana pancakes!), Norah Jones (which I listened to non-stop while pregnant), and Kenny Chesney (probably because of the fun tropical sounds in a lot of his songs). Tony also has an old mix CD that he and Ryan like to listen to while, ahem, jumping on our bed. Some of the songs have been censored by Mama, but it’s a lot of fast rock songs that are the perfect rhythm for jumping to. :-)

As for actual children’s music, we do have a few CD’s. We picked up the soundtrack to “Elmo Makes Music,” since Jenni was kind enough to take us with her family when the show was in town recently. We have the first “For the Kids” CD, which is really great…children’s songs sung by “our” bands – Cake, Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, etc. That one actually does make it into rotation in the car. "La la la la lemon" by BNL is awesome. We have two of the Sandra Boynton CDs that Erin mentioned in her post, but they haven’t really won any of us over yet, despite her books being some of our favorites. And we have some various lullaby/classical type CDs that also don’t get much air time.

As far as Ryan’s favorite song goes, I’d say it has to be a toss-up between “Wheels on the Bus,” Leah’s version of the Tiny Tim Turtle song that she taught us in Florida, and KT Tunstall’s “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” (the no, no, no part is easy for him to sing, and he loves to dance to it with me in the kitchen!). “Walkin’ in Memphis” by Marc Cohn also gets played pretty loudly on Saturday mornings when we’re straightening up the family room.