Olive has discovered song.

She knows about song in the abstract: if you ask her, she'll blare "La, la, la!" completely atonally at you.

She knows about songs in particular: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Jingle Bells, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, Backe Backe Kuchen and others have recently had renditions aired in our house. What's impressive isn't just that she memorized most of the lyrics¹, but that her pitch is pretty good for a two year old, and her rhythm is great!

Of course, "pretty good for a two year old" isn't all that good in absolute terms, but who cares about absolute quality at this age? It's incredibly cute, possibly the more so for the imperfections. Olive certainly doesn't care about those; her songs are expressions of pure joy and achievement, and I have no intention of spoiling that for her by pointing out areas of improvement.

She sings quietly to herself in the backseat, on long car rides. She sings loudly when she's at home playing by herself. She sings magnanimously on the occasions that I join in with her to sing along with her song.

She does not like it anymore when I sing some abstract, wordless tune to her. She puts a stop to that right away: "Daddy! No sing." Every so often, though, I her her experimenting with melodies that I can't identify.

The piano remains a very intriguing instrument for her: she still bangs along mostly at random, but now it's not complete randomness; she tracks up and down in a song-like range, and sometimes picks out single notes with particular care. She watches intently when I play some ditties, but doesn't like it when I take her hands to guide them through playing the tunes for herself.

It may not be a huge developmental step, but it's an incredibly joyful one; it turns out that when a girl this age breaks into spontaneous song, her happiness spreads with the range of her voice. We've had some very happy holidays this year.