You probably can’t read the girls’ tattoos, but they are “LEAH WHITE” tattoos. And the new lady hanging out with our family (not Bella, our adorable Goddaughter, but the big one)?
That’s Leah White.
About five years ago, my friend Shane (Bella’s mom), gave Catie a Leah White CD. Leah White is a children’s singer, and her kids go to school with Bella. With the CD firmly in the minivan disc rotation, we listened to it enough that our kids memorized every silly song. We burned the songs onto the giveaway CDs we made for birthday parties, and we shared Leah White with the rest of the world. Well, mostly just our neighbors. And Nebraska.
When our kids like a singer or animal or anything, really, they do this weird thing where they celebrity-ize it. For better or worse, these kids have the passion. No lukewarm fans around here. It’s either celebrity or dead to them.
Elephants are Elisabeth’s favorite animal, so she screams at every stuffed one she sees. “LOOOOOK! AN ELEPHANT! EEEEEEEK!” Catie is in to One Direction, so she spends hours making up scenarios about meeting them. “What if, I won some kind of contest, so they came to my birthday party, and just hung out with all my friends? Do you think I would THROW UP I was so excited?”Passion, baby.
The kids come by this celebrity-izing naturally. This summer, I’ve listened to Avett Brothers and Mumford and Sons constantly. So constantly, in fact, I literally hear “Lover of the Light” as I drift to sleep at night. If I don’t hear that song, I think, “How weird. ‘Lover of the Light’ isn’t stuck in my head tonight.” You can guess what happens next.
My Avett Brothers fixation came when my brother-in-law, and his wife, Melanie, asked us to go to an AB concert with them in Nebraska. Not wanting to be the only person in the crowd who didn’t know the songs, I bought all the CDs and listened to them constantly.
The word you’re looking for is NERD.
It’s the same story for Mumford and Sons. Amy‘s brother, Mark, hooked M and I up with some fourth-row Mumford and Sons’ tickets. These tickets are selling on StubHub for a couple thousand dollars. Houstonians are FREAKING OUT for fourth-row tickets to this show–especially now since the concert has been delayed and everyone’s anticipation is heightened. Due to my nerdiness, I didn’t want to be among fourth-row M&S fans and not know any of the songs. It seemed rude. So, I bought all their albums and listened night and day. Literally night and day because of the stuck-in-my-head problem.
Over dinner a couple weekends ago, I asked Shane if Leah White still played concerts. “Yes!” Shane confirmed. “All the time. Want to come with us next weekend?”
My kids were a little like, “Really? Our favorite singer is just PLAYING AT THE ZOO? Why didn’t we know about this?”
Just like their mama, these kids crammed for the Leah White concert. All week we listened to all her songs, all the time. To show blood runs thick in our family, the kids came up with the exact scenarios I had worried about….”What if we meet her and she doesn’t realize how much we like her songs? Would if we’re the only ones there who don’t know the words to her songs?”
Turns out, we were the only ones at the concert.
This could have been because it was two-hundred degrees that night at the zoo (think I’m exaggerating? check out Bella’s face, as red as her shirt). Or maybe the other Leah White fans were on vacation. But the whole situation (our families there EARLY with Leah White tattoos and no one else even knowing who the heck she was) turned out to be pretty funny.
Leah White put on a great show, and other families did stop to listen. And watch our crazy kids, dancing to songs they knew by heart. They danced and sang and yelled requests to Leah White, which she sweetly played. Even though she was melting in the six-hundred-percent humidity.
When I kissed Catie good-night, she said, “I felt like we were so INTO Leah White. Why wasn’t anyone else?”
Passion, baby.
Now, try to get some sleep, even with all those Leah White songs playing in your head.
