The One With Old MacDonald (Or Things That Go Oink in the Night)

All afternoon and evening I kept hearing music. I couldn't exactly place what I was hearing, but I ruled out angel voices pretty early on. It was definitely not inspiration...whispering a new song for me to write. You know how crazy you sound when you look someone in the eye and ask, "Do you hear that?" That was me all afternoon. As evening wore on, I decided it was someone in a neighboring home having a Christmas party, and I got a little grumpy thinking that it was going to keep me awake when I went to bed.

So as the poem goes, I in my kerchief, and DK in his cap, had just settled down for a long winters' nap, when out on the balcony there arose such a clatter... oh no! The sound was coming from my master bedroom balcony. It turns out that we were the bad neighbors keeping everyone for houses around awake. I rose up from my bed to see what was the matter, and there it was: Skippy's Fisher Price Old MacDonald's Farm. Yes, there was music. (Sing it with me... E-I-E-I-O!) But that was not all... no. Every time it played Old MacDonald, every animal on the farm was chiming in. There were pigs, horses, cows, chickens... it was awesome. It seems that Skippy had been playing with his toy there and left it. Yesterday we got about four inches of rain, and it brought Old MacDonald to life as though it was on the Island of Misfit toys. So DK brought the farmer and his animals inside and set them in the bathtub. End of story? NOT. It puts me in mind of the Happy Birthday incident...(Insert Flashback/Dream Sequence Here)

About 15 years ago, DK/KH got a birthday card, which we thought at the time was pretty revolutionary... when you opened it, it played "Happy Birthday to You!" We thought it was fun and inventive. Until one of the kids removed the small player from the card. Without the card to close, there was nothing pressing the little trigger that kept it from playing. So it played all the time. In the bottom of a toybox, where it would take half an hour to find. In someone's bed. Under your own bed in the middle of the night. I threw it away so many times, I can't even count. But to my horror, somehow it always found its way back into the possession of my children. Until one day, when one of them flushed it down the boys' bathroom toilet. That should have been the end of the story, at least for me. Happy Birthday should have been entertaining the rats and alligators. But no. Somehow the music box from Hades managed to get stuck in the toilet. I tried everything I could to reach it, but it played at random times for weeks and weeks. When it finally died, it was not a peaceful death...the kind where you just fall asleep and don't wake up. Oh, no. Instead, the music began sounding more and more as though it was being sung by one of the drunken sailors in the Pirates of the Carribean ride at Disneyland. "Happy Birthday to You." It was never a great song. But I would not mind if I never had to hear it again.

So, back to 2008. Bedtime. DK assured me that it must have been one of the kids making the farm music play, because look... there it is in the bathtub, all innocent, not playing at all. So we settled back in for the aforementioned nap, and had no sooner closed our eyes, when the barnyard went crazy. It was like a hoedown in my bathtub, what with all the music and animal noises. DK scrambled to remove the batteries, only to find that they were housed behind a panel attached by screws. The really tiny kind that you need a special screwdriver to open. It took a few minutes and a couple of different toolkits, but DK managed to open it. I was standing by with a really big hammer, just in case. Because we will never have a repeat of the Happy Birthday incident. And with an oink-oink here and moo-moo there... I was tucked back into bed, with visions of sugarplums dancing in my head. So Happy Christmas to all... and to all a Good Night!