Oh, we had a little party down in Newport …
March 20th, 2007 by Nick
Lucy is more than a month old now, and is becoming more alert every day. We also discover interesting things about her on a regular basis! As an example, on St. Patrick’s Day, she was being very fussy in the evening around Jay’s bedtime. Sharon and I had just had a couple of Guiness Stouts to celebrate the occasion, and decided to sing some Irish songs to try to calm Lucy. I spontaneously broke into the first part of the Cal Drinking Song (captioned below), which has a couple of references to the Irish later in the song. Sharon knows the song better than me, so, holding Lucy, she continued all the way through. For you non-Cal-alumni out there, it’s a long, involved and irreverent song that ends up with a granny, in her nightie, swinging from the outhouse door.
The funny part of the story is that Lucy immediately calmed about half way through the first stanza (below) and was quite happy as long as we were singing that song. We tried other songs, upbeat and mellow, and they didn’t work at all. But come back to the Cal Drinking Song, and all was right with the world again!
So the latest lullaby for kids starts as follows:
Oh, we had a little party down in Newport.
There was Harry, there was Mary, there was Grace.
Oh we had a little party down in Newport,
And we had to carry Harry from the place.
Oh, we had to carry Harry to the ferry,
And the ferry carried Harry to the shore,
And the reason why we had to carry Harry to the ferry
Was that Harry couldn’t carry anymore.
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