Price: $18.59

The predecessor of “Here Come the 123s“, this maybe isn’t quite as good but it still rocks. As you’d expect from TMBG, it’s quirky indie rock that’s clever, tuneful and FUN. Each song has some kind of letters-related theme - from simple letter tunes like “C is for Conifers” or “Go for G!” to craziness like “Who put the alphabet in alphabetical order?”. Educationally what you’d expect from this is that kids will get a sense that learning letters is “fun” rather than “work”, and maybe pick up a few letters on the way, rather than necessarily being taught anything in any kind of structured fashion. That’s ok though when the songs are this enjoyable, or at least ok by me and my kids.

There’s a DVD too that comes with the CD with home-made-y animated/puppet videos for each song - they’re not slick, but they’re funny and good, and they help tie the letter shapes to the letter names.

I’m one of those people who once thought “elemeno” was a single letter so my favourite song on this is probably “LMNO”, but there’s lots of other highlights to choose from, like the whimsical organ-based instrumental “Rolling O” or “Flying V” with its little Cuban piano muntuno. Isabelle’s favourite is “E eats everything” in which all the letters have various food quirks, except for E, who eats everything. “That’s a really good song”, she says. “Yeah, well”, says I. “It’d be nice if you ate everything.” “Don’t be silly, Dad.”

Price: $15.38

Silly / funny words sung along with classical music’s greatest hits. This grabbed me right from the start:

Beethoven’s wig is long and curly and it’s white

Beethoven takes his wig off when he sleeps at night

Because it’s big

It’s very big

Beethoven’s wig! Is! Big!

… sung to the tune of Beethoven’s 5th, with full orchestral accompaniment. Yeah, yeah I know - it’s pure daft, but it never fails to make me grin and the longest tune takes less than two and a half minutes, so the joke never gets old. It’s made funnier still by the main singer singing in his normal voice while the others sing in “opera” voices.

I hadn’t really realised how catchy some of these tunes are - I suppose without words to sing you’re less likely to sing them in the shower, but now I have words you’ll hear Verdi and Liszt if you stand outside my bathroom door. The words have also attached the titles and composers to the tunes in my head for the first time, so when I hear them on the radio I’m not going “hmmm I’ve heard that before” but rather going “Aha! It’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik!”

The music without the lyrics is on the CD too, and it’s a joy to listen too - well-recorded and played with relish. Classical music purists will probably dismiss this as a trivialisation of something serious and magnificent, but I love it, Niamh and Isabelle love it, and I bet Mozart would have loved it too.

Price: $21.79

Heather loves nursery rhymes, so we’ve listened to a lot of nursery rhyme CDs, and this is the best we’ve come across. It’s got pretty much every English rhyme - Baa Baa Black Sheep, Little Bo Peep, Jack and Jill, Three Blind Mice, Lavender’s Blue, Mary had a Little Lamb, Ring o’ rosies, etc, etc  - 52 tracks in all. The music is performed in an old English folk style, which sounds pretty much like you’d imagine it - picture a pub in merrie old England with long wooden tables serving tankards of ale and pigeon pie, or perhaps a scene from the court of Charles II complete with minstrels and jester, and this is the kind of soundtrack you might expect. Or I might expect, I’ve really no idea how closely my imagined Olde England corresponds to reality. Anyway, it’s a little bit like Irish traditional music, but more sedate and formal and somehow more medieval, played on fiddles, lutes and recorders and sung by two English-accented singers who sound faintly like Chumbawamba.

I’ve always had a soft spot for nursery rhymes myself, and have often plundered them in my own songwriting even before we had kids, but even I’d be unlikely to sit and listen to this all the way through for pure enjoyment. I would, however, happily listen to half an hour of it - it’s well arranged and well performed, and it’s head-and-shoulders above most of its competition, avoiding the usual irritating mannerisms you find on nursery rhyme collections. Plus, out of all the nursery rhyme CDs we have, this is the one Heather means when she points at the CD player and shouts “IMES! IMES!”.

Price: $14.10

Isabelle’s school put on two Christmas musicals this year - Bugsy Malone with the older kids and Annie with the younger. I didn’t really know what to expect, I hadn’t been to a school musical since I played Gertie Cummins (yes, a girl - I went to an all-boys school from the age of 8 ) in “Oklahoma!” myself, but I ended up enjoying it enormously. Doing these things as a kid, making a mistake IN FRONT OF ALL THOSE PEOPLE was horrifying, but when you’re in the audience the mistakes and the oddball things the children do are most of the fun - like a girl in senior infants reprimanding her classmate for looking the wrong way on stage, or a looooong pause in the dialogue ending in one boy reminding another of his lines in a loud whisper.

Isabelle’s class played a chorus of orphans. They shuffled onstage in their “orphanage-y” outfits, holding hands and blinking in the stage lights and looking tiny, to sing and do a kind of action dance during two of the songs. Really the experience was a bit overwhelming for Isabelle - she had sung the songs at home enough that Heather picked up the chorus of “Tomorrow” (singing “Tomowwo, onee a dee aweee” in her high chair), but on stage she spent half her time try to spot me and Niamh in the crowd, staring at the older girls and licking her lips over and over. She was still my favourite actor on the stage, of course, but I think she’ll enjoy it more next year.

This CD has become very popular in the house since. The big hit has been “The Hard-Knock Life” (you might know the chorus from the Jay-Z tune) which has knocked “Emmo dong” (”Elmo’s Song”, from Sesame St) off the number 1 spot in Heather’s most-requested-music list. “Daddeee! Had not IIIIFE!”, she says. Quite right too, it’s an absolute cracker. Other favourites are “Maybe” and “You’re never fully dressed without a smile”, and they’ve infiltrated themselves into mine and the kids’ consciousness to the extent that, at this stage, we’re starting to wreck Niamh’s head:

“Aaaargh! Guys! Please! It’s like I’m surrounded by the cast of Annie with you all breaking into song! Can’t you be quiet for JUST ONE MINUTE?”