Freebird!

The end of my long weekend started at around 6:00 last night, when N fell asleep on the couch, exhausted from a weekend of staying up too late and not sleeping in in the morning. Ultimately, I just had Baroy put him in his bed, and he didn't protest at all, and he slept through until the morning.

At the same time, Em was in her room poring over Teen People with her friend Jenny. (Yes, she's 7. Yes, I bought it for her. It had Mary Kate and Ashley on the cover! Shut up.) Baroy was listening to satellite radio and surfing the Web.

I was free. Free as a bird, yeah. And this bird you cannot change, ohwohwohwoh...

I decided to take advantage of this fact by taking a bath. A bath in the dark with about a dozen candles lit around me. A bubble bath. A very hot bubble bath. And to top it off, I brought up my computer and set my iTunes to play through my playlist.

A good hour later, when I finally emerged from heaven, Jenny had gone home. Em came upstairs and asked me about the music I was playing, which was nothing she'd really heard much of before, since she and her brother always dominate the music we play in the car, and Baroy (a fifties rock-n-roll junkie) dominates the music we play at home, when we do play music at home.

And so I brought my computer out into my bedroom, and went through it, playing her songs I thought might catch her fancy. We listened to James Taylor and Carly Simon belt out "Mockingbird." We twirled around the room to Van Morrison's "Moondance." I held Em and rocked and sang while we listened to Joni Mitchell sing "Circle Game." I played REM's "Happy Loving People," and Dire Straits' "Romeo and Juliet," and Elton John's unplugged version of "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me."

And then "Freebird" came on, and I tried to explain to Em about rock versus rock-n-roll, and about Lynyrd Skynyrd and about the phenomenon that Freebird was when I was in junior high and high school. I tried to explain about the cigarette lighters, and how every local band did Freebird, and it was all we wanted to hear. But then the beat picked up. Oh, Lord, I can't chaaaaahange. Lord help me, I can't chaaahaaahaaaahaaaaange.... And I jumped off the bed, and began air guitaring, and leaping around the room, and tossing my wet hair all around, and Em got it then. She was jumping all over the bed and keeping up with me and laughing, laughing, laughing. And 14 minutes later, when the long-play version was over, we both collapsed, exhausted, on my bed, and she hugged me and said, "Play it again. Please?" But it was dinner time, and I needed to grow up and go downstairs and be a mom.

Still, I think I made yet another convert to the magic that is Skynyrd, and Freebird. And that's pretty good for the last few hours of a long weekend.