Samantha has become increasingly interested in guitars lately. I think several factors contributed to this interest.
- We gave Chloe a child’s guitar for her birthday in early January. I thought that since Chloe saw her daddy play a lot, maybe she was interested too. Most of the kids at the birthday party liked to strum and play on it, and Samantha was no exception.
- There’s no doubt that Sam is in a Raffi kick right now. She requests Raffi all the time. We went through a Little People ABC Sing Along kick over the last 6 months, so I was honestly glad to move on to something else. The album artwork (displayed on my phone) shows Raffi playing a guitar and she likes to look at the picture when it’s playing. She and Brian watched a few videos of live Raffi concerts recently, and that further contributed to her knowledge that Raffi plays the guitar.
- There’s a painting of a guitar and piano in our living room that she likes to point out.
- And then, there’s church where she gets to watch all the musicians play all sorts of instruments (piano, organ, flute, guitar, mandolin, trumpet, trombone). She loves it.
So last night, I decided to bring out my guitar and let her play. I guess it had never occurred to me to let her try. A guitar was against my belly for the first nine months of her life, so why wouldn’t she have a familiarity with it? She really enjoyed playing and strumming for a while, and even began to pick out individual strings to listen to them separately. I think she is left-handed, so I turned the guitar (upside down for right-handers) and tried that for a while. Then I brought out the big guns. I got the tab for Baby Beluga (one of her most recent most requested Raffi songs) and played it. I thought she was going to flip. She was dancing and laughing! I wish I would have had an extra few hands to video the whole thing too. Then she started making requests: “donkey next?” Tingalayo is also another Raffi favorite, but the tab I got didn’t seem right, so it didn’t have the same effect.
Because we were at the computer (looking at guitar tabs), she began asking for Abby. I needed a few minutes to get her room cleaned up and ready for bed, so I sat her down in front of the computer to watch some Sesame Street. Apparently, yesterday was National Numbers Day, so Sesame Street had all sorts of videos and games on the front page that were about numbers. Some time ago, Feist was on the show singing her song “1 2 3 4” (modified a bit for monsters and penguins and chickens) and I loved it. I downloaded it a few weeks ago, but I have to say, I like the Sesame Street version better! We had watched the Sesame Street video after I downloaded it, so Sam was familiar with it. (Brian and I also had a whole discussion about the song too. We have discovered that I like many of the songs that are on Apple commercials – even without realizing it! Her song was on a commercial years ago and I never even knew it. I guess Steve Jobs and I have the same tastes…) What do you know that the Feist video was on the front page of Sesame Street last night! Sam kept saying “music music” but until she pointed to the video itself, I didn’t understand. If you’re not familiar with that song, it’s just a single female singer and a guitar (at least at first). And Sam noted that there is a guitar in that song as well. So naturally, we watched Feist’s Sesame Street version of “1 2 3 4” a number of times last night. (Sometimes I kick myself that she knows the word “again.”)
She has a small keyboard, a kazoo, and a band in a box already. I guess we’ll need to add guitar to that list.