For those of you with kids, do you wake them up by singing to them? Since my kids were little, I’ve sung to them as a way to wake them up. Usually not successfully (they are deep sleepers), but earnestly nonetheless. My kids will deny this – in fact, they just denied this the other day – but there are several songs that I’ve sung to them to wake them up over the years. Let’s talk about them.
Mr. Rogers – Come on and Wake Up! : the clip below is the entire EP, but the first song is all you need to listen to. From toddlerhood to teenhood I’ve been serenading my kids with this one, thanks to a couple of radio DJs when *I* was in high school who played this every morning as part of their own audience wake-up call at 6 a.m. If I heard this song once in high school I probably heard it 1,000 times. It seemed a natural thing to begin singing it to my own kids to help them get up in the morning.
Hair! – Good Morning, Starshine: Just the other day my kids denied, denied, and denied again that I’ve ever sung this to them. The problem is, I only sing it in my son’s room, and it’s not one of my constant “go to” songs in the morning. I typically will sing it as I enter the room and open the curtains before turning on the radio. At that point, the loud radio is what actually wakes him up. So it’s highly likely that no, neither of my kids realized that I sing this, but I do – as a pre-wakeup song. Denis began singing it the other day and I corrected him on the lyrics, stating that I sing that to the kids in the morning. Both kids cried out, “No you don’t!” as if catching me in a lie. But it’s not a lie. I definitely sing this song on rare occasions.
Bullfrogs & Butterflies – Good Morning Song: This is the song that caused me to write this post. I was singing this the other day to wake up my daughter, and randomly thought to look up the song on YouTube. How thrilled was I to find the ENTIRE ALBUM uploaded onto YouTube. Man, sometimes I love the Internet. When I was a kid, I LOVED this whole record. I grew up listening to cheesy Christian music and this was album is a typical example of what I listened to on the “kid music” front. For music I listened to as a teen, please see bands like White Heart, Petra, Steve Taylor, Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith and DC Talk – just to name a few. But as a kid, if I wasn’t listening to my album version of “The Hobbit,” I was listening to “Bullfrogs and Butterflies.” And thus this morning wake-up song entered my playlist for my own kids.
What about you other parents out there? Do you sing any songs to your kids as you try to wake them up?
