Kid, your taste in music sucks.
Every day after work I pick Cupcake up from daycare and bring her home, and every day she requests the same crappy songs. There are three songs that she likes to listen to, and one of them I don’t even have on the iPod. When she requests that one we basically turn the music off and sing it. Over and over. Until we get home. It’s like a twenty minute car ride.
Kids songs are like flossing. If you mix up the flavors and only submit yourself to it once or twice a week, it’s not so bad. If you stick with the same flavor eight times a day, your gums bleed uncontrollably.
I don’t mind kid songs. In fact, pre-Cupcake, I stocked up on some halfway decent kid songs. A producer friend of mine even gave us a bunch of really decent kid song CDs that he had been a part of over the years. When Cupcake was younger, we had a nice variety to choose from. As nice as possible.
Then I also decided that the Beatles were practically children’s music, so I also stocked up on the Beatles. Pretty soon we were repeating what had been a family tradition growing up for me and listening to the Beatles on Sunday mornings. Cupcake even like the Beatles, except for the fact that she always cried when Ringo started singing.
Now we have her three songs. Let’s go in reverse order, shall we? Oh yes, we shall.
Number three is ABCD. This is basically a modern take on the alphabet song. The melody and cadence isn’t the familiar Twinkle-Twinkle-Little-Star/Ba-Ba-Blacksheep that we’re all familiar with. I don’t have this one on the iPod or in my car. This is one she listens to with Mommy, apparently on repeat the entire way to daycare every morning. I’ve heard this one on family car trips to church or Costco and I pretty much hate it. When Cupcake requests ABCD I have to turn the music off and sing the ABCs – the REAL ABCs – for five or ten minutes with her. Why would someone be so crazy as to spoil their child by singing this song to them? Easy. Because she claps and says, “Yay Daddy!” every time I finish the song. Don’t pretend like you wouldn’t do the same thing in my position.
The next song is Frosty The Snow Man. Cupcake fell in love with this one because we have not one, not two, but three freakin’ illustrated Frosty The Snow Man books. Also, to try and divert her attention away from the other two songs on the list I started playing, and getting really excited for, Christmas songs. So this one is my penance, I guess, for trying to purge the other two songs. I would have much preferred Cupcake to have fallen in love with Wham’s timeless hit, Last Christmas. If there’s one redeeming quality to this song it’s the Thumpity-thump-thump part at the end because we (Cupcake and I) get to pound our knees in time to the music. That’s always a fun time. Always.
The first song, or final song, depending on which way we’re going, is a Bette Midler classic off of the old Sesame Street In Harmony album, called Blueberry Pie. Or, as Cupcake says it, “Booie Bye.” Typically she asks for Booie Bye before I even have her buckled into her car seat. Sometimes she’ll request Booie Bye before I even get her jacket zipped up inside the building.
At this point, Booie Bye has no redeeming quality. It’s borderline unlistenable. I have a mild headache now, at nearly 10pm, and I’m 93% sure it’s because we listened to Booie Bye in the car at 4:45. I’m so tired of this song that when I hear it I just want to jerk my head violently to the left through my window in hopes that my head will actually come off of my body, roll through traffic and get squashed by a semi. Just kidding! Not really.
Tonight was the icing on the cake. Just to clarify the metaphor I’m going with here, the “cake” is this whole practice of Cupcake requesting these three and only these three songs all the time in the car, non stop. It’s like a cake made with pestering, belligerence and a total lack of appreciation for good music. With “pissing off Daddy” as a leavening agent. Now the icing to this cake was when Cupcake, 20-seconds in to Booie Bye, requested Frosty The Snow Man tonight. The nerve of this kid! Where does she get it? (her mother, duh)
To prove my superiority I did what any self-respecting father would do. I turned up Booie Bye even louder and made her listen to it through her cries of protest. You asked for it!
