I've resorted to drinking songs. Baby Girl has been high-maintenance this week, which in my case means that she's been hyper-alert and attached and responding to my attentions and affections. It's kind of like I was an unknown rocker and my cover of "Jenny's Number" just got forwarded by a bazillion tweens on youtube and now it's exploding on itunes and this is all I've ever wanted but the fanship is really out of control and people keep prank paging my cellphone with "Please call 867-5304." Yeah, or. I guess it's not really like that at all. Since I only have a fanbase of one and she doesn't know how to text message yet. But she's a fan of me, and it's all I've ever wanted, but all at once, all day every day, and man would I just like to dust a bookshelf during the daylight hours.

But instead she's really being a bit of a mom hog of late.

She's striking a nice routine with me, though. Falling asleep at more of a seventh-grader's bedtime - an improvement over a college freshman-just-tasting-freedom-for-the-first time's-bedtime. However, now that we're nailing an earlier bedtime, this means less frequent and much shorter naptimes during the day. And when it's time to go down, oh I know it, because she starts pawing at her face and quakes back and forth, kinda like she knows the skinny jeans are never going to fit, but she's going to try to wriggle into them anyway.

So we go back to her room and sit in the glider, pop the binkey in and we sing.

Since this happens several times a day now, you can imagine there are only so many songs that I can work into my rotation. I try to sing her hymns to drive home the whole God loves you as subliminally and as often as possible into her little ears. But the truth is that I don't know the words to that many (and hoisting up a hymnal whilst holding all 13.3 lbs of this lump of love is ruff stuff) and I was only in one musical in my life, so I'm jumbling a lot of "Twinkle, Twinkle" with a lot of 865-5309-ee-iii-een.

Which is why I've started in with "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall." It's not that I want to encourage drinking to excess. I don't even drink, ever. But at least with this song, the repetition sort of lulls her, and it's not as though the lyrics are exactly complex. And tell me you don't feel proud when you can report back to Lovey Loverpants each day, "We were only at 67 bottles and she was totally down for the count!!!"