for no good reason i found myself singing the lullaby rock a bye baby:

rock a bye baby
on the tree top
when the wind blows
the cradle will rock so far so good. we’ve put the baby up a tree, but that’s not so bad…

when the bow breaks
the cradle will fall
down will come cradle
baby and all er, that’s a nice way to send your children to sleep: go to sleep now or you’ll get dropped on your head!

i’m trying to think of a nursery rhyme that doesn’t involve violence. jack and jill ends with jack cracking his head open. humpty dumpty is so broken that he can’t be put together again. three mice who were already visually impaired had their tails cut off by the farmer’s wife. the old woman who lived in a shoe whipped all her children and sent them to bed without any tea. ring a ring a roses seems quite nice until you learn that all that sneezing and falling down is about dying from the plague.

and they say kids today get too much violence from tv…