Singing to Sleep
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Thursday, July 15, 2010 10:35 PM
When I was first married and thought of my future children, one of the things I most looked forward to was singing them lullabies.
We didn’t have Michael Card’s album Sleep Sound in Jesus until I was in high school, so I don’t have memories of hearing the songs on it when I was a small child. But once we got the album, even though I was far too old for my mother to sing me to sleep any more, I promptly fell in love with it. And I couldn’t wait to someday sing the songs to my own children.
Then, when it took several years for me to get pregnant with our first child, I couldn’t listen to the album at all for a while. It made me far too sad.
Joy came along quickly enough, though, and after Camilla was born I got the album out again. We played it at her bedtime for months when she was a baby.
These days, just like I imagined would someday happen, I sing to my daughter at bedtime every evening. She picks two songs, I pick one, and then we end with a song from Sleep Sound in Jesus which Camilla calls “the ‘I love you’ song.” (You can listen to a sample here.)
Singing to my daughter is one of my favorite parts of the day. I dig into my memory to find the songs my mother used to sing to us when we were little: “I see the moon, the moon sees me,” and the one about the barges on the river, and many others that time-warp me back to seven years old, lying in the top bunk in our bedroom listening to Mom sing while she rocked my little brother to sleep. And Camilla loves them - often I’ll introduce her to a new song and the very next night, she’ll be asking for it.
Do you sing to your children? Did your parents sing to you? What lullabies do you love?
(Along with Sleep Sound in Jesus, I also highly recommend Michael Card’s album Come to the Cradle. There’s a song on there called “The Love that I Bear” - sung by a woman about her unborn child - that makes me tear up every time.)
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