And now to continuity in a different sense...

Nursery rhymes I never thought I'd forget have slipped my mind, and I'm finding myself reliant on CD's, toys and the internet to remember them. The funny thing is that kids really do dig nursery rhymes. We play other stuff for him all the time, but it's the simple tunes that he hears again and again the seem to catch E-chan's attention. So here's what I keep finding:

Hey diddle diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The (....something, something, something else...)
And the dish ran away with the spoon!

Usually it's the third line of a rhyme that totally escapes my memory. Thankfully, there are CD's of these things out there, and gradually you remember or re-learn them.

Then there are toys that play music. These aren't necessarily things you'd choose to have your kid listen to, but if there's a button on the toy that he can press to play music, he'll do it - again and again and again.... We have a toy that has such a button that we give E-chan to play with when we're changing his nappy. It plays Camptown Races. I was getting the sh%ts with the fact that I only knew the "Doo daa, oh Doo daa day" bits, so did a search on the internet, and lo and behold! There were the lyrics! I think I'll only bother with the first verse (there are about 30), but now at least I can sing along. The song is a negro non-spiritual, that talks about going to the horse races and placing bets, but then 'Ring a ring of roses' is about black death or something ("a tissue, a tissue, we all fall down!"), so I'm hardly going to worry about lyrical content just yet.