Our Little Orphan Annie

Lauren's musical taste runs the gamut like you wouldn't believe. Since birth, the Ipod at home and CDs in the car have of course been filled with baby classics such as Baby Einstein classical, Raffi, nursery rhyme songs, and standard children's songs sung (very badly) by toddlers (Itsy Bitsy Spider, anyone?).

After about 18 months, though, we couldn't stand it any more and decided to broaden her horizons. We started playing our Wedding CD, which has everything from Style Council ("You're the Best Thing That Ever Happened") to Madness ("It Must Be Love") to Marvin Gaye ("Let's Get It On"). Well, Lauren has loved the "grownup" music and now requests songs from the wedding on a regular basis. She sings along and shakes her booty. Momentously, I snuck one of my Neil Diamond CDs into car one day, and now "Sweet Caroline", "I'm A Believer" ("play the Shrek song, mommy!"), and "America" are in regular rotation. Yes, Norm was mortified, but Mommy was in heaven. I grew up loving Neil Diamond as a result of my mom, and gosh darn it, it tickles me pink to think I'm passing along the joy of "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" to the next generation.

To assuage Daddy, of course, she also now has learned and sings along to tunes from Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Counting Crows, and Elvis Costello. The entire family has regular dance jams in the family room with our favorites blaring out of those little Ipod speakers.

Lauren's true calling, we are coming to believe, however, will be in musical theater. This child adores show tunes. Over the past few weeks she has become absolutely obsessed with songs from the musical "Annie". I started it by singing "Tomorrow" to help her get to sleep one night, then found a video of an Annie production on YouTube for her to watch to hear it sung by someone with an actual voice. That lead to seeing YouTube videos of other Annie musical numbers, including "It's a Hard Knock Life." By far that one is her favorite now. She has the tune down perfectly, and belts out verses constantly (even though she makes up many of the words - I give her points for creativity). The only thing that concerns me a little is that she actually believes she is an orphan from the musical and tries to mimic all of the dance moves from the song she sees on YouTube. For those of you not familiar with the song, I beseech you to search for it yourself on YouTube and witness the "orphans" jumping from bed to bed and pushing each other down. No matter how many times I try to tell Lauren to stop singing while she's posing and jumping on her bed, when she looks at me earnestly and says "But I'm an orphan, Mommy", my heart melts into a puddle of warm fuzzies. Our own little Annie. She's got the red hair, now we just need to invest in some voice lessons and she'll be on her way.