A Girl...

Platypi and Uteri

I was raised to the tune of ten thousand silly songs. While the neighbor kids had only "mairsy doats," my mother was teaching me things like "Down in de meddy inna itty-bitty poo" and "Pigs kalliggs *snort* i-dilly-iggs." My grandmother was a fan of "There was a bee-eye-ee-eye-ee / sat on a wall-eye-all-eye-all / and it would buzz-eye-uzz-eye-uzz /and that was all-eye-all-eye-all," and my great-grandma knew "Bee-ay-bay, bee-ee-bee, bee-eye-biddy-bye bee-oh-bo, biddy-bye oh bee oo-boo biddy-bye-oh boo boo." NONSENSE! But what fun.

(I actually fell in love with Simon because a long long time ago I told him I knew a fantastic silly song about a platypus, and he immediately knew exactly which one I was talking about. Ornithorhynchus paradoxus, if you please, indeed!)

Now that I'm a big girl living in the nation's capital of "alternative living," some of my favorite silly songs are ones that were written to be sung in earnest. These are the songs I remember from my days as a budding Mormon. I went to church until I was about seven, and in those early years I learned lots and lots of propaganda anthems cute little tunes intended to indoctrinate set me on a righteous path. One of the first songs kids learn in primary is "I Hope They Call Me on a Mission". There's nothing quite like a room full of juice-stained four-year-olds expressing their deep desire to prostheletize to those less spiritually fortunate. How's about we try to perfect going pee-pee in the potty first?

This morning one of these awesomely bad kiddie church songs got stuck in my head. It goes:

“When I grow up, I want to be a mother, have a family:
one little, two little, three little babies of my own.
Of all the jobs for me, I’ll choose no other.
I’ll have a family: four little, five little, six little babies of my own.”

Six little babies. Six little babies that grown into six big, expensive, sass-mouthing teenagers. But whatever. (Somewhere in my mom's closet is an audio tape of me and my brother aged about four and six singing thing song, although we were looking forward to being mothers with "four little, five little, six little fartles of our own" or something else involving made-up words for gas or excrement. Some things never change.)

Now that I'm older, eight times out of ten I'll pick a baby over a "fartle." And pretty soon there will be even more babies for me to choose from. It's baby-on-the-brain day. Not only is SAJ about to welcome her little one, but today is also a coworker's last day before she goes on maternity leave to have a scrumptious Chinese baby. (Did you know that Chinese babies are the cutest? They are.) And last night I found out another coworker is pregnant--in addition to a third who is due in March. The talk around the water cooler is "What's in this water?!" and there are not enough italic html tags in the world to express my incredulity at the state of our office uteruseses.

So, um, yeah, I guess I don't really have a point here. Just a few tidbits from my musical repretoire and a note to say that I have been invaded by pregnant women. Let's hope they don't get all Big-Bellied Sneetch on me and try to take over the joint.