Scott Alexander

Every time the children learn a new word, they test whether it's a song.

When they got into fish, they asked for the fish song.

When they saw a butterfly, they asked about a butterfly song.

We relay these requests to Alexa, who comes through magnificently.

The algorithm knows we want children's songs related to a certain concept and can usually find one.

I recently learned that there is in fact a cottage industry among mildly scummy musicians in creating songs with whatever title they expect young children to ask for, especially The Poop Song, and racking in the $0.001 that Jeff Bezos hands out per Alexa impression from mildly mischievous two-year-olds.

We've learned songs we could never previously have imagined.

The Mummy song is an unbearably saccharine song about how much everyone loves mummy, so overdone that the real mummy begs me to make it stop.

The Daddy song, in contrast, is some kind of rap-adjacent song by a nubile young woman for whom Daddy is clearly a euphemism and is equally banned in our household.

The Doggy song is by an artist called The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over.

He must be really racking in those 0.001 dollar checks.

Alexa almost never fails.

One time, after our babysitter Jonah left, the children demanded the Jonah song.

I figured there was no way, but Alexa gave us a Christian kids song called Whale Did Swallow Jonah.

The twins were maybe 90% fascinated, 10% concerned.

Whale Swallow Jonah?

Kai asked.

I tried to explain that this wasn't Jonah the babysitter, but I don't know if it sunk in.

Buses are another emergency.

The mandated emergency procedure is to shout, bus, bus, bus, bus, in a loop, until diffused by a parent saying, yes, it's a bus.