All the world's a stage

This afternoon we had some friends over including an 8 year old girl and suddenly, bathed in the glow of the attention of an older (and very beautiful) child, the Spud turned into a one-boy show.

He had his finger puppets singing and dancing, he had a little Santa with it's own gruff little voice doing a turn and in general all he needed was a pair of tap shoes and a wig and we'd have had a 3-foot Ginger Rogers on our hands.

He's been singing a lot recently, songs he's been learning at nursery mainly. Sometimes he makes stuff up which is terrific but mostly it's stuff he's been fed. I have a bit of a beef with some of the nursery songs though as they all seem to be new songs using old tunes such as:

'Father Christmas
Father Christmas,
he got stuck,
he got stuck,
coming down the chimney,
coming down the chimney,
what bad luck,
what bad luck'

...to the tune of Frere Jacques for one. Ever since the first pop-stud closed around his chubby little legs we've been hearing bastardised versions of old stalwarts - it must be much easier to write new lyrics to old tunes than create new classics I suppose. It drives me nuts.

Another one he's been tweetling away at recently is sung to the tune of 'Twinkle Twinkle' and it's actually put my son off Marmite - so much that he now asks for 'Toast no Marmite please Mummy' which drives me bonkers as I never gave him Marmite without asking him first. The song in question goes:

Twinkle Twinkle
Maaaaarmite
something something (spread it on?) and
take a bite
If you drop it upside down
It will turn your carpet brown
Twinkle Twinkle
Maaaaarmite
something something (turn it round?) and
take a bite.

OK, so it is, in fact, quite funny... some sort of evil genius wrote it, I suspect. I tried to google it to find all the lyrics but failed, so if anyone knows them do drop me a line.

I did used to hate all this farting about with the classics but after three years of it I've decided that if I can't beat 'em I'd better join 'em and so, having trained him to sing all four lines of 'Happy Birthday to you, Squashed tomatoes and poo...', I am now looking for more that I can load him up with in the hopes that he comes out with them at nursery and drops a few jaws.

Have any of your kids come home with any good ones lately?

I'll give them twinkle twinkle.