Quiet please!

I wish my local library was like the Hogwarts library.

I'm not expecting flying books or cloak-clad wizard librarians (although that would be pretty amazing), I just love that old book smell and the possibility of finding a relic of a book in some dark and dingy corner that hasn't been rented out since 1906.

Instead what I'm met with when I visit the local council library is row-upon-row of polythene-sheathed Jackie Collins and Mills & Boon novels and a group of retired individuals each wearing the same baffled expression at trying to operate Windows 97 (to be honest, I'd be pretty confused too).

That said, the children's area is incredible and every Thursday morning us local mums fill the already cramped library with our all-terrain prams and double buggies in aid of Baby Bounce.

There is nothing I love more than having a good sing. My downfall is that although in my head I sound like Mariah Carey, to all third parties I am completely tone-deaf. So when I found out about Baby Bounce when Little O was around 3 months old, I was there like a whippet.

This free weekly (term-time only) event involves parents and a library representative singing nursery rhymes and kids' classics complete with complementary hand actions.  I say that we sing the songs 'to' the children as I am yet to hear a child sing at Baby Bounce. Most of them just stare at us wildly gesticulating towards them with looks of bewilderment.

Ah well, anything to belt out a classic in public. Even if it is 'Dingle Dangle Scarecrow'.

Here's one of my favourites:

Sing a Song of Sixpence (with a twist)

Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of cheese
Five-and-twenty monkeys swinging from the trees
Throwing down bananas, landing on your head
Call up the monkey police and send them off to bed!