Ease and effort

Dancing comes easy to little E. Rhythmic noise of any sort induces involuntary bouncing and undulating. He'll even dance to my attempts at singing, which do not fall in the category of rhythmic noise. The alphabet song is a new favorite. The squeal and squawk of our cranky refrigerator get him bopping. When the noise is actually music, especially if it's live and loud, there is no restraining the boy. He's quite serious about it though; not giggly or frivolous. Think Kevin Bacon in Footloose but with the dancing techniques of, say, the tin man from the wizard of OZ.

Yesterday E and I went to a nearby park which is home, this weekend, to a city fair of sorts. The main tent featured a New Orleans style band complete with a guy wearing a washboard. As soon as we got within earshot E began to wiggle. I stood him on a backward folding chair and the small boy danced for nearly 10 minutes straight. He didn't take his eyes off the stage. He just held on to that chair and bobbed up and down. The people nearby were very amused; pointing, smiling, and one man even recorded it on his cell phone. E was oblivious to all but the band.

Talking does not come as easily to little E as dancing does but he wants to just as badly. "Hi" and "up" are nearly effortless now and he uses them incessantly. Other than that though, you can hear the effort behind the words as he strains to makes the sounds he wants. "Duckie" is a new word for this week. He's got "cat" down pretty well; if you know that is what he is saying.

We went to the infant cognition lab this Thursday. E is a happy participant in their experiments which involve E watching "puppet shows" and the students observing his reactions. Thursday's show had a cat puppet. Actually, it was a box with a plastic cat head on top, but close enough. E spent most of the puppet show shrieking "CAT" and "HI CAT" (which we say whenever we see our own cat). The mother of the next subject heard him in the waiting room and commented on how he must have really enjoyed the show. I don't think he gave away the plot though because his utterances may seem like just happy baby noises to the untrained ear. I, however, know his exuberance was actually effort to communicate with the world, and the puppet, that he got it! That strange box thing was supposed to be a cat!

He also says "hat" though it sound a lot like "cat" (he's not big on leading consonants, dear duckie is really "uckie"). We'll have to pull out the Cat in the Hat and see if he can handle it.