Price: $18.37

Raffi is a kind of godfather of children’s music - not that he invented it, but he’s very much associated with its rise as a distinct genre in the 1970s, and he’s still putting out records (most recently in 2006). He’s better-known on the far side of the Atlantic where this record, released in 1976, remains a best-seller, but even so you’ll most likely recognise some of the songs. “Mr. Sun”, for instance, was used regularly in “Bosco” (a 70s/80s Irish kids tv show) in the part where they used to go through The Magic Door. “Brush your teeth” is, according to Isabelle, now used in Barney, and then there’s a few singalongs that everyone knows, like “Baa baa black sheep” and “Going to the zoo”.

It’s not hard to see the reasons for this guy’s enduring success. There’s none of the grating in-your-face cheerfuless you get in some kids music and TV, he just sings the songs straight up like some kind of friendly uncle. His voice is warm and rich, his band (in which Daniel Lanois plays mandolin) is capable without getting in the way and he totally doesn’t talk down to his audience. Even “Brush your teeth”, in which you might reasonably expect children to be hectored about not eating sweets, turns about to be a funny little rhyme based on the sound that the toothbrush makes in your mouth. I don’t know about your kids, but this approach is far more effective at encouraging mine to brush than my best technical explanation of cavity formation by acid-forming bacteria in the presence of sugars.

As well as being a really enjoyable listen, with some emotional depth amongst the fun like the poignant little “I wonder if I’m growing”, there’s some great jumping off points here for family singalongs. I spent this evening amusing everyone with my extra nonsense couplets for “Down by the bay” (like “Did you ever see some trees/Doing a sneeze?”), and “Willoughby Wallaby Woo” makes Isabelle completely crack up with laughter when you add teachers from her school to the song like this:

Willoughby Wallaby Woo, an elephant sat on you

Willoughby Wallaby Wee, an elephant sat on me

Willoughby Wallaby Wister Hoey, an elephant sat on Mister Hoey

Willoughby Wallaby Wiss Ryan, an elephant sat on Miss Ryan

Price: $14.97

Mary Poppins is one of the two kids DVDs in my parents’ house, and it’s the one Isabelle always wants to watch when we visit. If you haven’t seen the film then you should - recently Isabelle was watching a bit of it before bed, and after she was tucked in myself and Niamh and both my parents all sat down and had an absolute blast watching the rest. It’s funny and crazy and warm-hearted, with an ending that’ll make any Dad cheer.

The songs were written, funny enough, by the Sherman brothers who also wrote the music for The Jungle Book - real old-school professional songwriters whose father was also a songwriter, on Tin Pan Alley, and whose grandfather had been a composer in the court of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. They won Best Song and Best Musical Score Oscars for this, and the music is so different from The Jungle Book you’d hardly believe the same people wrote it. Instead of jazz it’s English music hall, which means there’s sentimental ballads like “Feed the birds”, comic songs like “I love to laugh” and dance numbers with oom-pahs and frantic singalong choruses like “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. Every single song is a knockout and, though the performances are far less “perfect” then you’d find in more recent Disney films - Julie Andrews is probably the only actor in this who’d be allowed sing in a modern movie - they’re bursting with character and all the better for it. I really can’t recommend this highly enough, it’s a true cast-iron classic - I even love Dick Van Dyke’s (as Bert) famously terrible cockney accent.

Speaking of Dick Van Dyke as Bert, I was casting around for his name when we were listening to the CD in the kitchen last week and Isabelle says “I know his name, it’s Youbert”. Youbert? It was only when “Jolly Holiday” came on and Mary sang “It’s a jolly holiday with you, Bert” did I realise where she got it from. So she’s listening to the words now, hmmm. I think it’s time to discreetly hide about half my CDs.

Price: $18.37

I mentioned before that I was planning a week of nightshifts in order to wean Heather off feeding at night. It didn’t go exactly as planned, as things were going crazy in my dayjob so I had to drag my spaced-out head in there each afternoon. It did, however, actually kinda work - before the week the latest she had arrived in our bed for the night was 2.45am, and now she’s getting to past 6am about half the time and she doesn’t look for milk if she does wake (which is usually because she’s teething - hurry up and grow, teeth!). Not exactly perfect, but a great leap forward nevertheless.

Anyway, in advance of the week, I stocked up on lullaby records and this is one of the best. The majority of the music on here is Japanese, but there’s also tunes from India, China, Tibet and Tatarstan (a republic in the Russian federation). One thing that really surprised me is how accessible the Japanese music is. The singing and the instrumentation can be pretty oriental-sounding, and perhaps it’s just the fact I’ve listened to this so often now, but if you changed the arrangements and had someone sing them in English I don’t know if you’d guess where the music is from.  The Chinese and Indian tunes, on the other hand, you can spot a mile off - the former in particular really evokes  the Chinese countryside, or rather my imaginary version of of it, complete with paddy fields and terraced hillsides and peasants in conical hats. Considering the closest I’ve been to China is watching “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” I suppose that might not correspond too closely to reality.

It’s hard to pick stand-out tracks. I love the Tatar Cradle Song, “Kokoro Ni Dakarete” from Japan and the Chinese one, but really it’s all pretty much perfect lullaby music - sparse arrangements, gentle singing and slow steady rhythms. I’ve given it some fairly extensive real-world testing during my nightshifts, and it’s performed well. It’s not a magic bullet - one night Heather didn’t close her eyes once from midnight to 3am, and slept only fitfully thereafter - but even so it got me some sleep that I wouldn’t otherwise have got, both helping to calm Heather down and keeping her asleep when she had finally drifted off, and it’s still one of my go-to albums on  teething nights.

Price: $13.61

The central children’s theatre in Moscow commissioned Sergei Prokofiev to write this to cultivate “musical tastes in children from the first years of school”, and it’s gone on to become pretty much the children’s classical music classic. Composed for narrator and orchestra, it’s the story of a young boy outsmarting everyone and catching a wolf. Each character has its own tune played on a particular instrument - flute for the bird, strings for Peter, horns for the wolf, etc.  - and the tunes re-appear throughout the piece as the story progresses. I think listening to this as a kid is where I got the idea that on oboe sounds like a duck (which, now that I think of it, it doesn’t really all that much).

This particular recording is narrated by Dame Edna Everage and she does a wonderfully dramatic job of it - her “LOOK OUT!” when Peter spots the cat stalking his friend the bird nearly made Isabelle leap out of her car seat.  The orchestra is great too - they play with relish, and the strings in particular are very rich-sounding, even on our very dodgy car stereo  (we have to copy CDs to tape because there’s no CD player in the car).

The music itself might not be what you’d expect from a 20th century composer - it’s very melodic, and I was amazed to find I could still sing along with most of it despite not having heard it since my own childhood. Peter’s and the cat’s tunes are the real stand-outs, both of which I’m sure everyone in my office knows now from me whistling them going up and down the stairs. The pieces are short enough for young attention spans and the story keeps Isabelle engaged, so it’s ideal for the car - we brought it on holiday with us a while ago, and between this and the Classical Kids CD “Beethoven Lives Upstairs” Isabelle was kept absorbed for hours.

Also on the CD is “Babar the Elephant” by Francis Poulenc, another story with musical interludes. The story - about a little elephant who, when his mother is shot by a hunter, goes to live in a town where he wears clothes and drives a car, eventually driving it home to the forest where he, out of the blue, becomes king - is utterly bizarre, like one of the crazy stream-of-consciousness stories Isabelle makes up herself. The music is, mostly, less accessible than Peter - the harmonies more astringent and the melodies less hummable. That’s not to say that I don’t like it - it reminds me of Stravinsky’s ballets a bit, which I love, but it’s inclined to make Isabelle fall asleep.

Then right at the end is Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra”, which is a more explicitly educational introduction to the different orchestral instruments, but we seldom make it this far before Isabelle demands to go back and listen to the Peter story again.