Crack For Mommies

I have 2403 songs on my itunes. A highly odd number of them from the 80s. Thirty five or so unlabeled ones that I stole off my brother’s laptop. A bunch from some musical I have never been to. Some I bought to make me seem cool. Some I bought because I am drawn to sappy music at the end of ABC dramas (which negates any cool that I might have gained from previously mentioned song purchases).

There are enough songs on there for me to listen to music for nearly a week straight without hearing the same thing twice. A lot a lot of songs. The strange thing is, I only listen to the same 20 of them. Over. And over. And over.

Laurie Berkner is crack for my child. She loves every last ditty from “Boody Boody Ya Ya Ya” to “We Are The Dinosaurs.” She will ONLY listen to Laurie Berkner…or “Laurie Boogner” as my Dancing Queen refers to her.

She is completely and totally head over heels in love with Miss Laurie. She is going to explode with joy at the concert we are taking her to in February. She knows the words to every song and sings along happily-and loudly. We have special dancing time during the day. And I’m sure because she read somewhere that it can aid in digestion, we have a little Laurie Berkner with dinner. We can be in the car for 6 hours straight and the only Laurie Berkner free moments are the 3 minutes of dead space between “Moon Moon Moon” and “Victor Vito.”

Here is the part of the blog where you think I am going to start saying I’m going insane over Laurie Berkner. How I hear her in my sleep. How when my husband should be singing me “When A Man Loves A Woman” he regales me with a fantastic version of “The Googleheads.” How I’m going to take the CD, shatter it into a million pieces and use the shards as ammo off the top of her recording studio.

But no. Laurie Berkner is my Mommy crack. I looooooooove Laurie Berkner. Not in the same way I love Kanye West or those great tracks at the end of sappy television shows, but in that good “well looky loo I have found something that makes my daughter enormously happy and doesn’t involve sugar, television or a trip to Disney Land” way.

I am telling you about Laurie Berkner because I feel it is my duty as a mother to do so. Her music is beyond palatable, it is fantastic. Truly well done and well performed. It is miraculous.

I have listened to many children’s CDs and the vast majority make me want to corkscrew out my eardrums just to make it stop. Just because you have a 10-year-old girl singing “Hit Me Baby One More Time” does not make it children’s music. An amalgam of animal sounds is not children’s music. People singing in high squeaky voices trying to be funny is not children’s music.

Laurie Berkner IS children’s music, but it’s more than that. It’s Mommy and Daddy music too. We all have to listen to it, so we might as well all like it. And when my husband tells me I’m a googlehead I know he means it from the bottom of his heart.