I'm so confused!

When I was a little girl my music collection consisted of Sunday school songs and other assorted Christian tapes for little people. I really enjoyed listening to them. My son has about half a dozen Veggie Tales’ compact discs, and an equal number of discs containing the more standard nursery rhymes.

As I listened along with him when he was a newborn it quickly came to my attention that other than the customary “Pat-a-Cake” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” I knew few of the others. How mortifying! Here I was, a grown adult, hearing many of these nursery rhyme classics for the very first time!

The really wonderful part of all of this was that my son and I were able to sit with each other and have a “first-time” experience together while choosing favorites. What makes my situation truly hilarious is that there were a few songs whose lyrics were new to me while their melodies were familiar because they were the same as some of the church songs that I grew up with. At times I feel like an individual who has grown up in a bilingual home: I begin with one set of lyrics and inevitably end with another. For example, just last night I began a rousing chorus of “The Old Gray Mare” and ended with some lovely lines from “I’m in the Lord’s Army”. Now that’s something one doesn’t hear everyday.

And then there’s my husband. He thinks he can just arbitrarily change whatever words he chooses whenever he chooses. If someone were to ask my son if he knows how to sing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” he may not deign to sing that, but he sure knows the words to “The Itsy Bitsy Lobster”.

My husband was recently asked how a lobster managed to squeeze into the water-spout; he replied that he did not realize the spider was inside the spout, and had always been under the impression that the spider climbed up the outside of the spout. Regardless of the fact that the spider is washed out in the song, I would still like to know how a lobster finds himself able to climb a vertical pipe in the first place.