100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

The chagim (holidays) are coming up!

Day trips, and car rides, can be fun!

Usually, it's the kids who drive their parents crazy during car rides.

Unfortunately for my kids, I'm the one who drives them crazy!!

I love to sing "The bear climbed over the mountain!" My kids, of course, get annoyed before I repeat the song even once! (too bad for them!)

I also sing "100 bottles of beer on the wall." My stick-in-the-mud kids don't like that one either!

But I did find a way to get them into it.

In a stroke of parenting genious (if I do say so myself), I changed the song ever so slightly, to make it more interesting, and also educational.

No subterfuge, just a little creativity (you know, the product of desperation!)

Basically, the song goes like this:

"100 bottles of beer on the wall, a hundred bottles of beer.... if ______ of those bottles just happens to fall, ______ bottles of beer on the wall."

Traditionally, the first blank is a "one" and the second blank is simply n-1. Not very difficult. The song typically has 100 versus, and can fill up at least 10-15 minutes of travel time.

However, you can substitute any number in that first blank space, making the subtraction a bit more complicated, and cutting out any number of verses.

Since the kids never knew how many bottles of beer would fall at any given time, they had to pay attention, and figure out (quickly) how many bottles of beer were left, so that we could continue singing....

When we sing it this way, sometimes they are even willing to sing it twice!

Try it!

(and let me know how it worked for your family!)



Please daven (or send happy, healing thoughts) for RivkA bat Teirtzel.

With love and optimism,
RivkA