What do your children listen to in the car?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a parent has to do their utmost to please their children, at all times. Even in the car. Now children in cars for any length of time is a recipe for disaster. Children do not like being in confined spaces for any great length of time and to make matters worse, they are strapped down. Not good.

Over the years, I have tried pretty much every kind of in car entertainment. A box or bag of toys, books, magazines, strange over the seat drawing thingamabobs, endless amounts of eye spy or spot cars of a certain colour, DVD player (only for long journeys) and story Cd’s.  Some have been more successful than others.  Some have resulted in near war experiences leading to mummy nearly crashing the car. Some have driven to mummy to near insanity (you know when you play eye spy with a toddler and they are very enthusiastic but spy the same damn thing three hundred times).

These days we keep it simple.  The younger boys often take DS’s on long journeys or a book, A has a bag of little things that seems to keep her amused and I regularly buy CD’s so we have some music to listen to.  Now after years of The Wheels on the Bus and other such imaginatively titled CD’s, I felt like I wanted to poke my eyes out with a spoon.  Seriously.  Where do they find the people that sing on these ‘children’s’ Cd’s?  Where?  Wherever it is I would like to go and give them a piece of my mind.  It is not entertainment, it is parental torture.

Somewhere along the line, we did progress to Cbeebies CD’s, which were somewhat more bearable, but I’m afraid that when A came along, enough was enough.  I was not going through that again.  The boys were getting into music a little, so I started to buy the Now that’s what I call music and Pop Party CD’s.  It wasn’t exactly my ‘kind’ of music, but it was good to see what was in the charts.  We did have a Disney CD which had songs from the shows and films for older kids such as Camp Rock and Hannah Montana which I quite liked, until I found myself singing ‘The Best of Both Worlds’ in public, so that had to go.

We buy a new CD every few months and it has become a bit of a tradition now and A usually has a ‘favourite’ song that we have to play several times in a row.  This week however, I began to doubt my choice of CD.  Firstly, we go back to school on Wednesday morning and the boy’s school is in a very quiet, rural little village.  Not quiet as we roll through at approximately eight thirty in the morning.  L has already pushed his sweat shirt sleeves up by this point, like some eighties throwback and just as we go past the school gates, where lots of anxious looking parents are standing, he pumps up the volume far too loud, winds down the window and starts making arm gestures out of the window in time to the throbbing music like we are passing through his ‘hood’.  Amused?  No I wasn’t, but he and his brother thought it was hilarious.

Then today, I am playing Nicki Minaj’s track, Turn Me On, for the umpteenth time as this is A’s current track of choice.  Yes, I do realise that a track of this nature is probably not the ideal favourite track for a not quite three year old.  But it is.  We get out of the car and go off to do some shopping.  As we are trundling around the shops, A is singing; “make me come alive, come on and turn me on, touch me save my life come on a turn me on” (or words to that effect, with a very clear ‘turn me on’ at the end of each line) quite loudly and one elderly lady said to me what lovely singing it was.  Thankfully, she must have had her hearing aid turned off.  She also does a very good rendition of the chorus of This is Love by Will.I.am, which goes “Hell yeah…”

Maybe I need to dig The Wheels on the Bus back out?