Up All Night- The Growing Prysocks

Let me clarify the title- parenting is not horrible. Jonah is awesome and I love being his dad. But with parenting comes certain horrible things, like side effects. At this point I could talk about diaper changing, losing sleep which leads to phantom baby cries and insanity, the messiness of feeding solids, or even the never-ending stream of drool that this little guy somehow manages to produce. But no, perhaps the worst horror of parenting is baby-friendly music.

Jonah got a jumperoo for Christmas and he loves it. It's probably his favorite thing. It happens to be (like many baby things) farm-animal themed. One of the many wonderful features of this item is the edutainment music that activates when Jonah jumps. One song is about various numbers of animals doing things and the other is about the sounds that farm animals make. I have tried to avoid this, but I have memorized these songs. I'm trying not to quote lyrics or go into too much detail so that those songs won't get stuck again. You see, when I'm driving around town or going about my daily business, what music do you think is stuck in my head? Is it the new Coldplay album? Is it Switchfoot's Vice Verses? Perhaps MuteMath? No. I can only hear inane, repetitive music about farm animals. Farm animals. Farm animals playing hide and seek and dancing. All. Day. Long.

To make things worse, the songs are sung in the most annoyingly happy, sing-song voice. I've often wondered how music tracks like this even get made. Is there a casting call somewhere? Do they recruit students at music schools? For this particular song selection, the lady singing sounds like a Disney movie reject. Not that she has a bad voice, mind you, just that she didn't quite make the cut. I imagine she walked out of her Little Mermaid audition disappointed and thought to herself, "Hey since I can't be immortalized in an animated children's classic, why don't I just use my talent to delight small children. And also torment hundreds of thousands of parents by burning my relentlessly happy voice into their minds FOREVER!!! Muahahahaha....." That last part may have been a dramatization.

So why is his jumperoo farm-themed you ask? I have no idea. This information is useless to him. We no longer live in an agrarian society. It would make much more sense for a jumping apparatus to have upbeat and jump-themed music that would set the mood for jumping. I mean would it be so wrong to have modern, cool music on a baby's playset? The first song that came to mind was this, which I think has a good beat for jumping around. But then it became clear that what he really needs is a Jump Playlist. This is what I have come up with:

Jump by Van Halen (an obvious choice)
Jump (For My Love) by The Pointer Sisters (yes, that song from Love Actually)
Jump by Kris Kross (Jonah should be cultured in the 90's)
Jump Around by House of Pain (I think this is the single most appropriate song for jumping)
Jump by Flo Rida [feat. Nelly Furtado] (I stumbled across this by accident and it seems to fit, thanks Spotify)
Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice (...just because)

So what's Jonah's favorite? I think the video speaks for itself.



But seriously, he really doesn't need to know about farm animals yet. Yes, someday when he asks where his bacon comes from, I will tell him- heaven. I mean, pigs. Bacon comes from pigs. From three little piggies twirling around and OH GOD MAKE IT STOP!!!