The ever curious child in everyone?

Isn’t it amazing how nursery rhymes are immortalized as they’re passed down from generation to generation? Such is the power of children's abiding fascination for nonsensical verse, combined with a pretty melody. It’s so funny how babies like to hear the same words, or tunes, over and over again.









These curiously cute retro baby prints by artist Lilian Rowles, available at ShopCurious, remind me of the lullabies my mother used to sing to me. My favourite was ‘Go To Sleep My Baby’. I’ve looked this up on the net and it seems there are many variations of the lullaby. The words I know (using my name by way of example) are:







Go to sleep my baby -
Close your big blue eyes
Angels up above you,
Watching little Susan from the skies;

Great big moon is shining,
Stars begin to peep,
It’s time for little baby Susan
To go to sleep.










If there’s enough demand, I’ll ask my mother to sing it for you too. By the way, she soon progressed on to rather more curious rhymes, for instance:

If all the world were paper,
And all the sea were ink,
And all the trees were bread and cheese,
What would we have to drink?









And curiouser still…

My Aunt’s name is Aloysia (pronounced Al-oo-ish-a) Waterbutt,
She lives down at Burton on Trent,
Every time she goes out on her bicycle,
She always gets her handle bars bent...

That one always had me in fits of giggles.





I’m not sure if this is just a sad weakness for nostalgia, but my theory is that childlike curiosity sometimes doesn’t go away - and can develop into a lifelong taste for unusual things.

Anyway, I was wondering if you might want to share your childhood favourites too – or perhaps even some of the lullabies you’ve sung to your children…

Do you?