Maya In The Sun

BB continues to be quite a musical little creature -- she loves to sing and make up songs. Often, they are fairly incomprehensible, given the speed and strangeness of her pronunciation (combined with the fact that she is often dancing and whirling about while singing). But yesterday, I had a rare opportunity to figure out what she was singing.

BJ and I had been working on his "Song Book." He's discovered that if he doesn't know the words to a song he can ask me or S to look them up. "Can you Google it, Mommy?" Then we print them out and he carries them around with him. "I'm learning the song!" he'll declare as he sings it aloud (sometimes a cappella, sometimes accompanied by the song on the stereo). So far we've made print outs of "Jingle Bells," "Rock Around the Clock," and John Denver's "Country Roads" (a song that he sings at preschool, apparently -- he was enormously satisfied to figure out that it's the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River). Stapled together, they have become his Song Book.

BB was watching us as we worked on this task, and she asked if I would print out the lyrics to one of the songs she made up. Of course I agreed! It took a few attempts to get it right, and I wasn't entirely sure that I'd heard everything correctly, but when we'd finished I read the whole thing aloud to her and verified that each line was written as she'd sung it:

Maya In The Sun

Maya in the sun.
Then and in the barn.
Then up in the sky.
Then burned your hand in the sun.
Then had a shadowing.
Then it had a bum.

And then it had a barn.
Then it had lots of shadows.
Then it had lots of friends.
Then it made fun of you.
Then it got number to two.
Then it had a burner.

The End.

I'm pretty sure that the "bum" has nothing to do with a scruffy guy on the street and has everything to do with her typical way of ending a song or verse (she likes to intone, "Bum, bum!") She paused there at first, giving it a bit of a fake ending. But she wouldn't confirm this interpretation and didn't have an answer when I asked about the bum. And don't ask me who Maya might be, because I'm at a loss and BB was not inclined to explain! When I inquired, she gave me the equivalent of a two-year-old's, "If you have to ask, you'll never know" look, so I didn't push for an answer.