I got my DaddyBear nickname when Junior was a very young boy.  We used to watch The Jungle Book* quite regularly, and at one point, Mowgli calls Baloo “Papa Bear”.  Junior was tickled by this, but in our family, “Papa” is what you call your grandfather, so I was “Daddy Bear”.  It stuck.

One of my favorite songs to sing with the kids has always been “The Bear Necessities” from Disney’s Jungle Book, and Boo always starts smiling when he hears me humming it and breaks out into his version of the lyrics.

If you watch me play rough with my kids, you’ll also notice the similarities. 

Yesterday, one of the men who wrote that song and lot of the other songs I love from my first and second childhoods died in London.

Robert B. Sherman, one half of the prolific, award-winning pair of brothers who penned instantly memorable songs for “Mary Poppins,” “The Jungle Book” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” — as well as the most-played tune on Earth, “It’s a Small World (After All)” — has died. He was 86.

Mr. Sherman, thank you for the fun that you’ve given my family, and I can promise that that fun will continue for at least one more generation. Girlie Bear has made me promise that I will play and sing as DaddyBear with her children.

*I’m a big kid, I admit it.  The first movie I ever bought on VHS was The Jungle Book.  Of course, the next one was Highlander, but you do what you gotta do.