Prodigy

It's early evening. V is next door, watching tv on the laptop. I'm sitting on the sofa with F, rocking her to sleep and humming to her. She likes singing to go to sleep to. She requests it by grunting insistently until you produce a tune she can humph along to.

Tonight, I'm singing 'Lille Katt', which is an Astrid Lindgren song. I don't know many of the words, and the ones I do know get a bit approximate, so I've switched to humming after a few repetitions. It's a very repetitive song, so I'm not really paying attention any more.

Then I notice that she's actually grunting in time with me.

If I sing 'lille katt', she sings 'nnnn nnn nnnn' with exactly the same timing. Maybe it's a fluke? I stop and start again, and after a couple of false starts, she tunes in again. She can only do the first two lines, she stops or gets lost on the third. But it's clearly deliberate, even through the optimistic goggles of fatherhood.

Obviously this means I have to run round the flat bragging about my incredibly intelligent daughter and trying to get her to demonstrate for mummy, which fails because she gets audience shy and stops doing it.

But it still happened. Not five months yet and she can keep time! I am wild with pride. I'm not over-reacting, this must be how Mozart's parents felt. Before he started composing canons about arse-licking, of course. Give her time.