Who could ask for anything more?

Cailan’s got rhythm. I’m not sure how this happened.

For the past week or so, dinosaurs have been pushed to the back burner as Cailan’s inner drummer has re-emerged. Anything in the house can instantly morph into a pair of drumsticks: antennae from the ExoBonz sets, two pieces of driftwood from a beach in Washington, utensils at the dining table, the remotes for the TV and receiver… And much of the time, he doesn’t use any sticks at all, just his hands. They are in constant motion.

Anything in the house could serve as a drum, too. The ExoBonz containers are a particular favorite: turned upside-down, they make a nice set of tom-toms, and their lids become cymbals. There are several paint cans in the garage that are now arranged as a semi-circular drum kit, with a roller tray beside them as the crash cymbal. The magazine rack in the living room, made of black metal slats, is a xylophone. The lid of the kitchen trashcan, which is right at shoulder height for Cailan, is now covered with little dimples from his mallets. The stools at the kitchen counter are actually tall bongos.


The thing is, he’s really pretty good. A favorite mealtime pastime (his favorite, not ours, because it interferes with eating and can make a simple bowl of cereal drag on for hours) is banging out rhythms with his hands on his placemat. He likes to play rhythms from CDs that we listen to, especially the songs from his Music Together class, and see if we can recognize them. And we often do:

Trot old Joe, trot old Joe
You’re the best horse in the country oh -

Diddle diddle dumpling my son John
Went to bed with his breeches on.

Saturday, he was playing a rhythm over and over that we couldn’t place. He told us it was from the blue George Winston CD, track number one. Chris turned that on, and we could hear the line that Cailan had been playing.

And for some reason, though I swear we don’t have Westside Story playing, the rhythm I hear from him most often is

I like to be in A-mer-i-ca
OK for me in A-mer-i-ca

Where he got this, how he navigates the switch from 6/8 to 3/4, is a mystery to me. But a bigger mystery is, what made Chris and I respond to an ad on Craigslist and pick this up:


Cailan doesn’t know about them yet. I’ll update after the weekend.