Takes After Mommy

When I was a kid, I knew I had reached my limit of books at the library when I physically could not carry any more. My parents would drop me off for an hour and I'd waddle back out to the car looking much like Ds here. My arms would be aching under all the weight! Once we were home I was off to my room to lie on the bed reading for the rest of the day.... never had the willpower to put a good book down for long. Sometimes it was a field guide to butterflies, or a horror novel, or a choose-your-own-adventure (which I still love, deep down), or Dick Tracy strips, or a manual on how to raise livestock, or a book on origami, or a collection of political cartoons.

Ds is such a little bookworm; it's so fun to see him get excited about reading. He'll recite his favorite sections of books like "Horton Hatches the Egg" several times a day, out of the blue. It's one of those things I keep thinking I should get recorded but we don't have the resources to do that here. Maybe someday...

When he's not reciting, he spends a lot of his time listening to music and singing - I think I have a heavy influence! Much of our day is spent along the lines of "sing a song?' "which song?" "turn on radio?" There's nothing quite like a 2-yo's a capella "Give me the beat boys and free my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock and roll and drift away..." He also sings "Salve Regina" quite well but he needs a little bit of help remembering what comes next, and his Latin is not very polished. In fact, it sounds more like gibberish than Latin, but it's still adorable. He really gets into it at the end, "ohhhhHH clemens, OOOHHHH PEEE-AAA" - makes me grin every time. But what's really exciting is that Ds generally stays on pitch and I am really looking forward to fostering his natural musical talent. He also does very well with rhythm; most times I clap out the beat of a song he knows, he will correctly guess the song before I'm through. We've looked at simple sheet music and I sing the melody while pointing to the music notes in rhythm. He is fascinated by this, especially if it is a song he knows. He also really enjoys when I play a song on his toy xylophone and we sing along together. It's just a simple octave xylophone, but at Christmas Ds is going to get a quality toy piano with 2 octaves and functional black keys. Very exciting for Mommy!