A new bedtime ritual....(a new blog ritual?)

We've got a new tradition that's crept into the bedtime routine, it started a while ago but continued taking on momentum to a point at which I've finally had to limit it to maintain my sanity.

I've always sung Dylan lullabies before bedtime (or Christmas carols or nursery rhymes). Point is, I've always sung to him as one of the last things before bed. With Miles it's literally become the last thing we do, we end our bedtime routine with "song.bed." as I tickle the hair on the back of his neck while singing either "Rock-a-Bye-Baby" or "Mommy Loves You" (the song I made up and sang to Dylan...that's become one of Miles' favorites). But I digress...the point was, I've always sung to them.

Around-about the time of my mom's last visit I started singing Dylan made-up songs to the tune of "Walking in the Park One Day" (obscure song I've never heard of but my mom always sings it to the boys and it's turned out to be a very adaptable melody). It goes a little something like this:

I was walking in the park one day
in the merry, merry month of May
when I was taken by surprise
by a pair of violet eyes
in the merry, merry month of May

I started off simply, just changing one or two words. Updating the setting from park to whatever was appropriate to the "surprise." So it'd be..."walking by the beach one day...taken by suprise by a pair of sharkie eyes" and the like. (We were going through a major fascination with anything that lives in water and so could take this and do it for hours with every sea creature we could think of.) Back then it was mostly me deciding what text to substitute. At some point, Dylan started joining in with requests for specific surprise eyes. In the meantime, we've abandoned the original text entirely and Dylan is pretty much the sole creative force behind the text I sing.

Nowadays the process runs something like this: I inform him that he can have two songs. One made-up and one lullabye. Then he asks me why only two, I inform him that mommy's tired too and wants to go to bed...(we have that same conversation EVERY night but that's a different story). Then I ask him what song I should sing and he tells me. Tonight it was a "shark song." So I ask him what the shark is going to do. Tonight he informed me that "the shark should swim with Nemo. And then I will jump off the diving board and swim with them in the big water and snorkel." I take that and run with it...to the tune of our favorite made-up song.

It's become such a "thing" that lately I've been thinking it'd be fun to have a record of it in 20 years when I'm a sad and lonely empty-nester-type-person...so here's me thinking I'll try to type up our song text every evening after bedtime.

Without further ado...here the made-up song for the day:

A shark was swimming one day, he swam with Nemo all day...
Dylan went to swimming lessons, and learned how to swim
so he could swim with them.
He jumped off the diving board, into the big deep water
And had fun with the shark and Nemo.
He snorkled all around, and saw so many fishies...
he was such a big boy.