"My Baby's Got ... What?!?"

For a long time now, we've been playing a white noise CD in Eleanor's room during the night because we have squeaky old wooden floors and a dog who sometimes barks in his sleep. Now that Declan's around, the white noise is even more important.

A few weeks ago, however, she figured out how to change her iPod nano from the white noise to actual songs. Overall, I'm not sure how I feel about this. Will this keep her awake longer? There's still the benefit of background noise, but with lyrics and key changes, etc. As with so many other discipline issues of late, it comes down to the fact that I don't have enough energy to argue with her about it, so we chose a playlist of pretty mellow songs and left it at that.

I don't know if it keeps her up (any more than anything else), but I have discovered that she does listen to the lyrics. At naptime one day last week, Ben Folds's cover of "Golden Slumbers" was playing when Eleanor asked me, "Did he say 'Once there was a wedding'?"

I said, "No, he said, 'Once there was a way ... to get back homeward,'" and we then discussed the meaning of the lyrics before reading her princess stories and turning out the light.

So tonight she was all tucked up in bed, and the rest of us were downstairs in the living room. Suddenly, we heard her music start blasting and a pitter patter of feet as she hopped back into bed. Keith went up to check out the situation, and when he came back down he was laughing so hard he could barely talk.

Apparently, Eleanor turned up the music because she likes G. Love's "My Baby's Got Sauce." However, she told Keith he sang "My baby's got sores" and she liked that part. I'm guessing "sores" isn't really a part of her vocabulary yet, and I feel no need to enlighten her. We are going to have to listen to our music a little more closely, however, for profanity and the like before it makes it on her iPod and she starts singing it at school.