I love my job
So, have I mentioned that my little guy who likes to yell "Eeeeeeeeee!" all the time is also kind of a musical savant?
'Savant' might be a bit much, but the kid is extremely musical. Academically, not so much. Think of your average toddler, that'd be the kind of skills we're working on--colors, shapes, what have you. Language? Forget it. Like a toddler who only has to point to get what he wants, this kid might be capable of speech, but we can rarely coax any words out of him.
Today he was looking at a book, which he does from time to time--more often tapping out rhythms on the cover than actually looking at the pictures. I noticed he was really absorbed in looking at the back cover for some reason, so I sidled over and observed him from a few feet away. The book was part of a series of 'easy readers' graded one through four, so it had a little blurb about each reading level on the back cover, along with the numbers one through four.
He was touching each number in turn and reciting "one, two, three, four"!
I was so excited to see him using language, without any prompting. When he stopped counting and started touching a picture on the cover and just humming to himself, I couldn't resist sitting down with him and trying to get him to count again. He complied, taking hold of my index finger and making me touch each number in turn as he said them. He then touched my finger to the little picture at the bottom of the page, and hummed again. When I failed to sing along, he jabbed my finger insistently at the logo and sang louder, "da-da-da-DAH!"
I had no idea what he meant, and had to hold the book away from me to see what the heck he was pointing at (darn farsightedness!) Yep, it was this, the Twentieth Century Fox Films logo:
Only the one on the book was black and white and no more than half an inch square. You know how the logo shows up on the screen before a movie or video, and that trumpet fanfare theme music plays? He'd identified that music from that itty-bitty logo.
We spent the next fifteen minutes counting to four and manically singing the 20th Century Fox theme music.
In other news, I said something witty enough on a forum that someone deemed it worthy of quoting me--on an icon, no less. I'm inordinately proud of myself. ;)