Once when I was in college and sitting around in the cafeteria lounging after dinner (in that way that is only possible when you are young and your greatest responsibility is an upcoming three-page paper for your Ancient Philosophy class… oh, college) I was part of a conversation in which some friends and I went around the table and decided what type of offspring each of us could possibly produce that would result in the most ironic situation.

The poetry-writing, literary fanatic would have a kid who hated to read, the sisterless, football-talking, feminine-hygiene-topics-make-him-visibly-uncomfortable guy would have five girls and be home alone with his oldest daughter when she got her period for the first time, the rule-following, honest-to-a-fault one (*cough* L *cough*) would have a bully with authority issues, etc. One stab at a guess for me was that I (a vocal performance major) would have a kid who was tone-deaf.

That prediction has not turned out to be true, and in fact, while Noah can sing a tune just fine, Rosie appears at 22 months to be able to match a pitch exactly when singing along with a melody, and later can reproduce it pretty accurately when singing a capella. She is a music junkie, always asking for the radio or a CD or the DVD of kids singing Farmer in the Dell and London Bridge Is Falling Down.

(Also? This is her favorite song. I don’t know what to tell you about that, except that….yeah, I got nothing. Feel free to judge away at my parenting decisions. But for serious, do NOT sing along with this song while she is listening/grooving to it, or someone will get hurt. And it will be you.)

Here’s what the actual irony has turned out to be: Rosie hates it when I sing. Like gets violent hates it. When we’re in the car driving around and I DEIGN to chime in with the lyrics of a song on the radio, the screaming that commences from the backseat is akin to that of a person being forced to get five tetanus shots while sitting in a pit of vipers. For a while I complied with her request that I stop singing, just to get her for the love of God to stop that infernal racket already, but then I had a moment of clarity wherein I remembered that she is not the boss of me (a moment where I only just stopped myself from saying those actual words, because sometimes I am mentally 3 years old) and began singing with cheery gusto whenever the mood struck.

I figure that the hearing loss I am sustaining from these delightful car trips is worth it, so long as she learns the life lesson that you can’t control what is going on around you, because other people are free to do what they choose.

And also that she is totally not the boss of me.

Mostly.