Fluffy Parenting Fun

Our life rarely even approaches “dull.” Most of the time I’d call life with S. and Little A. random, unexpected, and delightfully surprising. Life lately has been no exception.

Little A. gets a very intense, inward look when he concentrates hard on his thoughts. He got that look this morning at breakfast, then asked his sister to tell him words. As you can imagine, the precise, ridiculously accurate, dedicated-to-splitting-hairs, fourth grader gave him a bit of grief. How could she talk without words and what kind of words did he mean and did he mean words like…

I zoned out.

When I zoned back in, S. was saying, “So, like ‘TV’?” And Little A. said, “Yeah.” He still had that concentrating look.

S. thinks for a minute, then says, “Salt.” I can tell she’s just getting warmed up.

Little A.’s face relaxes; he’s not concentrating anymore. “Well, that works.”

He went back to eating breakfast while S. and I looked at each other. I took the bait. “What worked, honey?”

Between mouthfuls he said, “I wanted to see if I could listen while I was thinking about something else.”

Somehow, I feel that this does not bode well for me at all.

* * * * * *

So, Big A. has been working quite a bit lately and I’ve been hanging with the kids. Needless to say, I quaked in my boots when S. started singing a highly improbable song lyric last night and then said, “You know the song!”

See, the odds are that I don’t know the song. I’m not the one with the musical background or the extensive music collection. That would be Big A. But I really, really, really need to know the song. Why? Because otherwise I’d be stuck listening to S. sing cheerfully upbeat and endless repetitions of, “Your lipstick stinks on the telephone.”

No problems pinning that one down. Nope.

I dropped S. off at her activity and, to my surprise, Little A. started singing the song. Thinking he might help me, I started asking him for clues, Twenty Questions-style.

“I don’t know, Mommy.”

“Well, where did you hear the song?”

“I heard S. singing it.”

Dead end. But in the car on the way home that night, I managed to get from S. that it had a “normal” guitar (not electric), one guy singing, that it was not in a minor key, that Daddy plays it in late afternoons (like when we’re cooking), and that she would call it a “regular song” (not jazz, country, pop, or rock).

Now I KNOW my husband could probably identify the song within about three guesses. Not me. Luckily, the kids were headed for bed and I had a reprieve.

At breakfast we eliminated Toad the Wet Sprocket, The Avett Brothers (“It’s only one guy singing, Mom!"), and Nickel Creek. At the bus stop, I played to my strengths and went with words. I settled into some serious lyric Googling. And then…heart in my throat, I interrupted the five millionth humming of her lovely phrase.

“Is this it?”

It was.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister”? It comes complete with the opening lyric, “Your lipstick stains on the left side of my front lobe brains.”

I rock.

In case you’d like the less fluffy story of the last time I had to uncover a song S. described, read here.