Growing up, Steve and I ate dinner very differently. His folks would tuck into their meals silently. The food would all be on the table with place mats, and they would all hunch over their plates and just eat.
In my house, my mom would be moving back and forth between the table at the stove putting food on the table. For years, I thought that moms didn't eat. My dad would be conducting family conversation. He would tell stories about growing up, and the kids would all compete for attention. Sometimes he would use dinner time as an opportunity to teach us stuff. For months, he made us memorize the presidents in order holding up flash cards of their faces. We would chant, WashingtonAdamsJeffersonMadisonMonroe and so on.
So now we've got kids of our own. On most days, Steve gets home too late for dinner. It's just Jonah, myself, and the Mute Kid. When Steve's home, he reverts to his old tucking into your food style of dinner. I look at him and say TALK. And he's like, what? I'm eating.
Silent eating drives me insane, so I've had instituted certain rituals to get the gang talking. The first ritual is that everyone has to say one thing that happened that day. This evening, over fish sticks and sweet potatoes, Jonah talked about having lunch with his friends. Ian told me that his day sucked because his Pokemon wrist band was in the wash. Well, he said, "I lost my Pokemon wrist band and I sad." I told them about my classes today.
Then I asked them if they knew the song, "I'm Bringing Home a Baby Bumble Bee." They didn't. So I sang all the verses and Ian pretended to sting me in the foot. Jonah was shocked and appalled that his mom was singing a song about mashing up a bumble bee. Turns out the kid doesn't know the classics. What are they teaching kids today? He doesn't know the diarrhea song or even my dad's classic "Beans" poem. "Beans, beans, they're good for your heart. The more you eat, the more you fart. The more you fart, the better you feel, so let's eat beans for every meal."
I have a new mission before me, I see. My kids must learn the classics. What else do they need to know?
Apt. 11d 
Miss Lucy Had a Steamboat? I’ve been educating my daughter via this site. She’s learning all sorts of important historical references.
We do not have silent dinners. My daughter is a chatter, and my son likes to vocalize randomly, probably to compete with her. My husband and I can barely get a word in edgewise.
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There was an old lady who swallowed a fly…
etc. 🙂
It’s appalling at the end when she swallows the horse and dies of course.
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I think I would prefer those to what I got when Snuggly Girl had a friend stay over last week: the dysfunctional family version of the Barney song. Ick. I banned it from the dinner table so they resorted to humming.
Maybe I’ll teach them the baby bumblebee song. Much better.
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Ding dong the witch is dead- sung from a swing set.
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Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher meat?
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school?
Jingle bells, Batman smells?
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That’d be “greasy grimy gopher GUTS” but perhaps my I am giving away my Canadian prairie upbringing…
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I learned it as “greasy grimy gopher guts” too, Mamalooper. That’s what they sang on the playground and at Scout camp in eastern Washington.
Unfortunately, I can’t come up with any others. Doug already named all the good ones.
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1, 2, 3, 4, 5, once i caught a fish alive
6, 7, 8, 9, 10 then I put him back again.
Why did you let him go?
because he bit my finger so
which finger did he bite?
This little finger on the right.
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“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the ants play pinochle on your snout”….a little more disturbing than most of the others, though. My kid learned it at school and was shocked that I knew it.
My favorite was always “I stuck my head in a little skunk’s hole, And the little skunk said Well bless my soul, Take it out, take it out, remoooove it. etc.
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“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the ants play pinochle on your snout…”
Ah! Another one that I’d forgotten. At one time, I’d memorized a version of that song–perhaps combined with some other worm song, something having to do with “oh there’s a lot of worms, way under the ground”–that took something like ten minutes to sing in its entirety.
How about “the ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah”?
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There was one I learned at summer camp called “The Billboard Song” but there’s one line I’ve forgotten and it drives me nuts.
The song starts “As I was walking down the street a billboard caught my eye/the advertisements written there would make you laugh and cry…” The song continued with a mish-mash of ads for various consumer products. Some of them were dated even when I learned the song in the late 60’s.
The part I can’t remember is in the 3rd verse. Please help.
NUD
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