Making up songs in cars with boys

Last Saturday I went to the Oquirrh Mountain Temple open house with Becca and her boys, T and K. The boys were remarkably well behaved and behaved very respcetfully both before and during the openhouse, when K whispered to me that he knew that the temple is where "marrieds" happen. "You mean weddings?" I whispered back. "Yeah, marrieds," he replied.

After the openhouse, they had apparently used up their supply of reverence and became a little more rowdy. Then we drove to Becca's aunt-in-law's house for lunch, and it became clear that some kind of intervention was needed to keep them entertained. Becca and the aunt were up front and I was back with the boys. So, I resorted to singing silly songs.

There's one we sang when we were kids where you take any well-known nursery rhyme and modify it thusly:

Georgie Porgie, Pudding and Pie
Kissed the girls and made them cry
When the boys came out to play
They threw him out the window
the window
the second story window
With a heave and a ho and a mighty blow
They threw him out the window


Jack Sprat could eat no fat
His wife could eat no lean
And so between the two of them
They threw it out the window
The window
The second story window
With a heave and a ho and a mighty blow
They threw it out the window


You get the idea. I wish I could play the tune, but you get the idea. Of course, T and K loved this idea and soon they wanted to sing their own versions of the song. I quickly discovered that they weren't aware that the general idea is to use a nursery rhyme and modify it, when they started coming up with the following gems. I had my notebook out of my purse transcribing as fast as I could:

A cowboy was sitting on his horse
and then the cowboy jumped on a pole
and T and I came into the park
and then two spiders came right up our pants
and we threw them both out the window
(etc)

K was in a tent making his bed
And then in came T and threw him out the window

A car was driving down the road
and a snake came along
and a spider threw him out the window

The grass was blowing and a spider was there
and a snake came along
and threw a tree at him and threw bomb at him
and threw him out the window

And, my favorite:

Maria was sitting at a table in the house
and along came a spider
and asked her if he could throw her out the window


You may notice some recurring themes in these rhymes. Before we began singing, we were entertaining ourselves by pretending there were lots of snakes in the car- both mean ones and nice ones. I had to eat one of the pretend snakes because it just wouldn't behave, and the nice ones kept giving T little licks, which make him happy. The spiders I'm assuming were abundant because the first nursery rhyme I sang to them was Little Miss Muffet. I especially like that the spider I encountered in the song was polite enough to ask me if he could throw me out the window before actually doing so.

The boys liked these songs enough that we sang them all the way to lunch and then all the way home from Draper to Orem, and I heard them breaking into random renditions of the song throughout the rest of the day. I'm so proud.