Sing A Song!

My sweet little baby (ok, she’s 20 months, but she’ll always be my baby…) LOVES music! She will literally dance to anything – cd’s, tv theme songs, commercials… Her new favorite song is “Itsy Bitsy Spider” or as she refers to it, “Wash!” I started singing this song to her quite a while ago, but it finally struck a chord with her in the past few months. When I first started to sing it to her, I did the hand motions that go along with it, but when I started to move my hands she grabbed them and so to this day, when we sing the song she holds my hands and moves her hands along with mine. She particularly loves the part of the song where we sing “and washed the spider out” and our hands go out to the side, illustrating the spider being washed off the spout. Hence her calling the song “Wash.” The other night, my husband was working and it was just my girls and I for dinner. In the middle of dinner, my little one says, “WASH!” And so, on cue, my older daughter and I start to sing, “The Itsy Bitsy Spider, climbed up the water spout, down came the rain and washed the spider out, out came the sun and dried up all the raid and the Itsy Bitsy Spider climbed up the spout again!” And as soon as we finished she again said, “WASH!” So, we sang the song again. “WASH!” Now, at least she says with a big smile on her face, and she’s so cute about it that you can’t resist – my daughter and I sang “Wash” EIGHT times in a row! Finally after the eighth time she and I were laughing hysterically and at this point my littlest one said, “E I E I O!” Which meant that she was ready to move onto “Old MacDonald!”

If you are anything like I was as a new parent, I felt totally out of the loop on kid’s song lyrics – I panicked over Twinkle, Twinkle when my first daughter was a baby – couldn’t remember the lyrics to save my life! Of course, I went to the trusty Internet and searched for song lyrics! One site you can check out is part of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences which has an index of songs, children's song lyrics, and they even play the music so you can hear what the tune is, if you are unfamiliar with the song. Websites like this were great for me with my first daughter, because she had a lot of sleep issues and finally I found that singing her songs while she was in bed helped her drift off to sleep (my soothing, melodic tones, I’m sure!). But she was interested in songs like “Puff the Magic Dragon”, some of the Disney songs, “Rainbow Connection”, “Return to Pooh Corner” – you name it! She would even make requests. But from looking those songs up and singing them to her literally hundreds of times, I have quite a number of songs in my repertoire!

Whatever your method or your talent (I will NOT be singing at Carnegie Hall any time soon…) – it’s a fun activity for you and your children to sing together, and music is always a wonderful thing for children to be exposed to. Not to mention, it makes for nice memories for both you and your kids!