And IIIIIII Will Always Love Yoooou-Tuuuube

Caution: The following blog entry may result in you getting a particularly irritating Whitney Houston song stuck in your head for the next several hours, which may in turn cause you to seriously consider taking a power drill to your frontal lobe. I cannot be held liable for any carpet cleaning bills you may incur from such procedure.

As Elsa gets older, one thing I've noticed about her (besides her amazing ability to speak to dolphins at the same pitch and decibel level) is that she loves to sing.

Perhaps this is a girl thing. Rollie isn't much of a singer. He'll sing once in a while, sometimes in a tune I can even recognize....as long as it's Happy Birthday. But for the most part he prefers talking. And yelling. And making unintelligible noises and sticking out his tongue and just being obnoxious. Which, as we've all recently learned, is definitely a boy thing.

Elsa, on the other hand, has always enjoyed singing. Even more so since we recently attended a minor league baseball game. During the seventh inning stretch, a little girl went out on the field and sang a cute little warbly rendition of God Bless America. Elsa was enraptured. She talked about it the whole way home, and while I put her to bed, she asked me to sing it to her. Eight times in a row. And a 2 a.m. encore. And a 5:30 a.m. encore (during which I discovered that I sound like an 80-year-old smoker at 5:30 a.m. She didn't ask for me to sing again after that performance.).

Now that she can talk, almost carry a tune, and hold a microphone (which could be anything from a disembodied Barbie leg to an actual microphone back from our pre-child karaoke party days), Elsa spends a lot of time staggering around the house in various stages of undress, belting out the tunes. Kinda like how I imagine Liza Manelli probably spends much of her time.

I guess what this really means is that she is my daughter after all (and because she looks and acts nothing like me, I had my doubts for a while there). Back when I was a kid, one of my biggest fantasies was to sing the Star Spangled Banner at a baseball game. I practiced singing it whenever I thought no one could hear me...in our backyard, in the shower (on the rare occasions that I took one), in my bedroom, in the back corner of the school bus. Anyone sitting close-by likely thought I was just extra patriotic...and a little strange. And that my socks didn't match. And that I smelled a little funny.

ANYWAY, Elsa's newest obsession is YouTube. She will sit on the floor with Jeff's girlfriend--I mean iPad--and search for clips of this little British girl named Connie singing I Will Always Love You. Yeah...that song from The Bodyguard. Yeah. Whitney Houston. Not sure how I feel about my daughter being an indirect Whitney Houston fan, but she's also a big fan of drinking her own bathwater, so I'm hoping both things are symptoms of being two years old and not knowing any better. At least let's hope so with the Whitney Houston thing.

Elsa's YouTube obsession sometimes leads her to find clips of other things that are actually more obnoxious than a precocious little ingénue and her six-year-old vibrato (I know...is there such a thing as a precocious ingénue? Or something more obnoxious than a six-year-old with a vibrato?). I leave the room while she's watching Connie, and when I come back she's found a clip featuring little kids singing and farting in the bathtub. Or a montage of babies doing things like sneezing, eating and other mind-boggling feats, set to music by James Brown or Chubby Checker. Eeeesh. I guess there's still time to mold her into a little person whose humor is just a tad higher-brow, but sometimes I feel like she should be more refined by now. Perhaps a trip to the opera is in order. Or at least some YouTube clips that don't revolve around bodily functions. I'll take The Bed Intruder at this point.

So Rollie is a runner, and Elsa is a singer. Wonder what the next one's secret talent will be. If my own family is any indicator, the youngest will be really good at skate-boarding, speaking in monotone, and bench-pressing his own body weight. And really bad at staying out of Texas jail cells. (Kidding, Ev! I will always love yooooouuu!)