You are my sunshine.

So I find it difficult to come up with post headings most of the time. I always think of the same ones and have to check if I've used them before. And I'm always jealous of those who have a theme like 'song titles' or cities or whatever. So I was thinking about a post (its been a while) and I thought I'd go with a song. But then it reminded me about my history with this song. The story begins now...

When my husband and I were going out we lived briefly with his parents. It was primarily because I had to move to Brisbane for work temporarily and had moved out of my granny flat and had nowhere to go in the interim. Anyway, the day came when I had to go, and I gave him a little gift to remember me by. It was a sponge duck, which when emersed in water would play an electronic beeping version of 'you are my sunshine'. Remove it from the water and it would stop. After this touching gift I'm sure we embraced and then I drove away.

That night as I sat in a hotel room somewhere near the Queensland border I called Nath. He had just got out of the bath and had put the duck in the water. It beeped as expected. Then he took it out. It kept beeping. We agreed that it must have a little residual water in it and took bets on how many hours it would take to stop beeping. The box had said it would go for around 3 hours!

The next morning Nathan rang. It had not stopped beeping. At some stage during the night he had angrily stomped into the bathroom and shoved it in the laundry basket under some towels. When checked in the morning it was still going strong with its incessant 'you are my sunshine'...

That night (24 hours after the fateful bath) it was still beeping. His father banished it from the house.

The next day I was in serious trouble. The sponge duck of doom was still beeping. And although it had been removed from the house it caused the dog to howl all night(the dog had evidently tired of the bloody song too).

I told Nath that maybe he should just rip the damn thing open and step on its infernal sound mechanism. But this was personal. It was him versus the duck. And in the end only one would still beep.

That night (48 hours post bath) it went into the garage in a suitably soundproofed receptacle where its beeping could not enrage or induce insanity in the residents.

For four days post bath - 96 hours give or take - Satan's duck poured forth its demon's song. Nathan vowed that if he ever had to hear it again then the singer would be eviscerated immediately.

Flash forward three years to the birth of our daughter. Night time. Colic-y baby that won't settle. I'm swaying and singing everything short of 'i like big butts' to try and sooth the child. In what can only have been a moment of insanity I launched into 'you are my sunshine'. The child stops. And it becomes the only song that will soothe her.

I estimate that given she is 5.5 years now and that I would have sung it at least 10 times a day for the first two years, and at least once a night every day since that I have sung it 4,927 times. That's all three verses. And that's not counting the times I've sung it to Paddy.

I think I've been punished enough.