Musical Boy
In addition to dancing, Robin has discovered that he likes to sing. By which I mean, he’ll sort of tunelessly vocalize whenever music he recognizes comes on. He gets upset when I try to sing along though. Which maybe ties into another of his little tics: Nanita saw this one. He gets very angry whenever two people sing at the same time, or even when Sam and I accidentally say the same thing in chorus. Seriously, he’ll start screaming loudly. I can only guess that it causes some kind of sensory-processing error in his little brain?
But in related news, his favorite book is “Where the Wild Things Are.” Now if you remember your Sendak, you’ll know that there are three wordless pages that come after the line “And now, cried Max, let the wild rumpus start!” When Sam and I read the book we do “rumpus music” as we turn those pages. My rumpus music goes like this: Arooooo boom boom boom! Aroooooo boom boom! Well, Robin has started singing along during the rumpus. He gets pretty close too: “Oooooo boo boo! Ooooo boo!” This doesn’t seem to bother him. So it’s hard to tell what to triggers the auditory overload.
I’m guessing that a quarter of what he says now is meaningful content. Unfortunately we can only understand about five percent. Language, at least for Robin, hasn’t really been a process of acquiring words one by one. It’s more that he babbles steadily, and that this initially amorphous babble is gradually taking on the cadences and contours of actual speech. Which makes sense, because after all he’s not just picking up words. He’s learning tones, contexts, the rhythm of conversation. It’s not so much that he’s building vocabulary up through discrete steps, but that he’s sculpting his stream of vocalizations into speech and song. It’s getting clearer every day.
