Tura Lura Lura – hush little bubba

Today is another Sepia Saturday– Monday Memories combined post. The theme this week is sleeping babies, reading and related memories.

The image prompt shows a woman reading quietly while her baby sleeps tranquilly. Most mothers would roll their eyes at this, thinking of how tired and busy they were with small children. Perhaps I was lucky, or just plain selfish and stubborn, but I took to heart the advice I received, to rest when the baby rested. My memory tells me that I would indeed sometimes read while they slept, though I certainly didn’t look like this immaculate woman. On the other hand somehow I seemed to fit far more into the day then than I manage now with sewing, cooking, freezing and other household chores.  Whatever I did while they slept, it appears not to have been take their photos!

Plainly here I was replicating a baby photo from my own baby-book with our eldest, though the two places were thousands of kilometres apart. If you could see the background of mine it was in a surburban garden, and I think that’s a clothes prop in the background. If we could see the background in the second photo you’d see a village with people, pigs and a pit-pit fence round the gardens…a vast cultural difference apart.

They say that you take myriad photos of your first born and that it’s a slippery photographic downward slope from there. We were different from this, mainly because we didn’t have a camera until later in the peace.

We did own a bassinet for each of them, but they quickly grew out of it and into a cot. I have zero recollection of where I bought the cot, but I do recall stripping and painting it on the front verandah of our house in North Goroka, Papua New Guinea. It looked quite smart and her room was jazzed up with some cheap decorative items. Later the cot would be re-painted yellow and recycled for our youngest daughter.

And an interesting theme appears – we seem to take more outdoor photos of our babies, probably because there’s no need to keep them rugged up all the time. I love this photo of my husband as a baby. Don’t you adore that gorgeous crocheted rug? I wonder if his mother made it or perhaps her mother?

Sometimes you just don’t care where your kids sleep, so long as they sleep (that probably accounts for my smile below). The two older daughters looking totally zonked out on the beach at Magnetic Island.

It’s nearly time to go to sleep little baby. Did your mother sing a lullaby to you? Mine always sang Tura lura lura to me, and my children, while she stroked my/their forehead and hair. I carried on the tradition with our girls, but I tried not to traumatise them by singing to them very often, though the forehead “patting” remains a family tradition. The lullaby tradition carries on to the next generation with it being sung by one daughter to her children.

This is a lovely Indigenous bi-lingual lullaby by Territorian Ted Egan . You might like to listen to it before heading over to read about other Sepian sleeping babies before you snooze off, dreaming of angels, fairies and shamrocks.

Tura lura lura

Over in Killarney,
Many years ago,
Me mother sang a song to me
In tones so sweet and low.
Just a simple little ditty,
In her good ould Irish way,
And I’d give the world if she could sing
That song to me this day.
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral,
Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral,
Hush, now don’t you cry!
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral,
Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral,
That’s an Irish lullaby.

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