Rockin with the kids.

Last Friday, I helped babysit my cousin’s three little girls, ages 5, 3 and 1. They are just absolutely the cutest and sweetest kids you have ever seen. If you know someone, even your own kids, who you think might deserve that title, well, you haven’t met Yasmine, Aleah and Arianna. Trust me on this.

So we built a fort out of one of those L-shaped couches, complete with a castle on top. I used to love forts, well past their age, too. My brothers and I built a several forts every week in the summer when we were kids. Some of the most complex involved a dozen beach chairs and picnic tables and benches, piles of beach towels and all our mom’s clothespins. We had rooms for different things, secret exits, skylights, windows, even radios. I seem to remember crude security systems in the form of minor booby-traps, too.

We are helping out again today because their grandmother (and my aunt) is in bad shape due to some major back trouble. I’ve been teased that my wife’s half-Italian blood has run into my own, because when asked if we would be there to help, my reply was: “What? How can you ask that? We’re family!” I like to think my own ethnic blood had at least something to do with that, or, more likely, how generous my parents have always been with everyone.

Anyway, I thought that another fort might bore the girls, so I am bringing my mandolin today. I looked up the chords to some children’s songs, and the baby positively dances whenever she hears music. I have some light-gauged strings on there tuned down 1/2 step, so it won’t be so loud that it makes them deaf — not that mandolins are very loud to begin with.

And when they feel like dancing without singing,* I arranged some good old rocks songs in my head for mandolin: “Sweet Child O Mine,” some U2, etc. Kids and music are a good mix, even better than kids and forts.

*[Have you heard the Melissa Etheridge song "Dance Without Sleeping"? They play it in the trailer for Goodwill Hunting. It's a good song that you should listen to. Email me for it if you want to.]