Well, fast forward to just shy of her second birthday, and my little toddler taste-maker is quite adamant about her musical likes and dislikes.  Her current word for music sounds like “wee-wee,” and don’t ask me where that’s from, ‘cause I have no clue.  Once, I thought I could hear her pronounce the second syllable like “wik,” which would rhyme with “[mu]-sic,” but I don’t know...  So anyway, I’m gonna write it like she says it, so you’re warned, okay?  Don’t skim this and then go, “what the fuck is ‘wee-wee’? is she talking about going pee?”

 

 

The developing toddler brain is amazing.  If you don’t have kids, if you’re not actually watching it happen in real-time, it’s hard to imagine the kinds of neural connections that are firing off every nano-second in your kid’s head.  For example, in the background of about five seconds of video of The Pumpkin and a friend jumping maniacally on a trampoline at said friend’s birthday party is the briefest of snippets of Gnarls’ Barkley’s “Crazy.”  After several repeated viewings of the tiny clip, on demand, The Pumpkin declared that “Crazy” was “[her friend’s] wee-wee” whenever she heard it, in the car, on t.v., whatever.  Now, it’d hadn’t registered to me as particularly significant, but you know how when you play a slideshow on iPhoto, it asks you to pick music from your iTunes library?  Well, hardly any of my music is in differentiated playlists, so I just got in the habit of clicking on one of the few albums I had made into a playlist:  Beck’s “Guero.”

 

So a couple weeks ago, I pop in my “Guero” cd in the living room stereo, and The Pumpkin goes, “Pumpkin wee-wee.”  Well, not “Pumpkin,” since I only call her that in the blogosphere, but you know what I mean.  So the first track, “E-Pro,” plays, and The Pumpkin’s dancing around.  Then the title track, and more dancing.  And then track three, “Girl,” and more dancing.  As it goes to track four [whose name I can’t even remember anymore since I’m not allowed to listen to it], she starts. freaking. out.

 

“Pumpkin wee-wee!  Pumpkin wee-wee!”

 

See, it turns out that, the way the length of our slideshows have tended to work out, “E-Pro,” “Guero,” and “Girl,” in that order, have accidentally become the de facto soundtrack to slideshows of pictures of the only subject that really matters to The Pumpkin—that is, herself.  Hence, “Pumpkin wee-wee.”  The first three tracks of Beck’s last album before the brand-new one are now, in this house, “Pumpkin’s music.”  It so easily could’ve been, say the first few cuts on M.I.A.’s “Arular”—that would’ve been interesting—but it wasn’t.

 

And so, for the last few weeks, I have found myself answering both polite requests and strident demands for “Pumpkin wee-wee.”  And as soon as track 4 starts—hell, as soon as track 3 ends—watch out!  “Pumpkin wee-wee!  Pumpkin wee-wee!”  Sometimes we can get her distracted so that she doesn’t notice till like track 8 or 10 that “her” music isn’t on anymore, but as soon as she does—”Pumpkin wee-wee!”  At one point, we tried to convince her that all the tracks after hers are “Mommy’s music,” but that’s just resulted in cries of “No Mama wee-wee!  Pumpkin wee-wee!”

 

My partner-in-crime laughs when I scramble for the CD player or remark that I should get off my butt and make an iTunes playlist of just those tracks on repeat and burn a copy, saying that we’re the adults, remember?  We don’t have to put on her music just ‘cause she asked for it.

 

But then my toddlergirl will intersperse the demands with a “Daddy, I want Pumpkin wee-wee, please.”  And how can you refuse that?

 

[And I mean, c’mon!  It’s Beck—whom I’ve gotten her to say once in a while, though it sounds more like “Butt”—not the freakin’ Wiggles at least!  Right?]

 

And like I said, I can be as music-snobbish as anyone—so when Justin Timberlake’s “Sexyback” comes on the hip-hop channel of XM in the car and The Pumpkin declares that that’s her BFF’s “wee-wee,” I can smirk with relief and say, hey, it could be worse!

 

[Heh.  Just kidding, BFF’s mom!  You know we love y’all!]