Music
Olive's absolute favorite Christmas present this year was a Toniebox: like a stereo, but with a control scheme designed for small children. In particular, you don't have anything as finicky as a tape or CD to mess with, but a little plastic figurine which magnetically sticks to the top of the box. Just pop that thing on, and music begins playing. It's a really cool bit of user-interface design, even if the actual technology involved isn't all that mind-blowing.
We'd purchased it with the idea that she'd listen to children's audiobooks, and bought several of them for her, but that plan had a fatal flaw: the box came with a single customizable figurine. Just log into the website and upload whatever you want; it'll be loaded onto the figurine, to be played back at Olive's convenience. At 10 PM the day before we traveled to her Oma's house, when I was supposed to be wrapping the thing, I was instead crafting what amounts to a mixtape. Track 1 is her absolute favorite song right now: The Colorful Song1. It was all downhill from there: she now has both the power and the authority to turn on music more or less whenever she feels like it, and she has absolutely no hesitation to take advantage of that.
It's great to see her getting so into music. There's an additional factor, though: when I was a small child, one of my most treasured possessions was a cassette tape onto which my Dad had copied a bunch of his favorite music. It had everything from Don Henley to Starship to Yes, and in a household otherwise dominated by Catholic Rock, it was a breath of fresh music2. Maybe a third of the songs on Olive's mix were inherited from that cassette; it feels like I'm passing on a tradition.
Other than that, there's only really one recent anecdote worthy of note: Olive and I were chatting about professions today, talking about how I'm a programmer, and Christina is a librarian, and when she grows up, she can pick a profession. "You can be anything you want," I told her. Her response cracked me up: "When I grow up, I'm going to be a frog!"
I might have hurt her feelings, laughing at that plan. She didn't let it faze her though; she just amended it. When I tried to repeat the incident for Christina's benefit, she told her that she was going to be a doctor, instead. We told her that that's a perfectly respectable profession, and we'd be glad to have a doctor in the family. Even so, I can't help but hope that at some level, she's still hoping for a compromise, envisioning a frog with lab coat and stethoscope.
Happy new year, from all of us!
Olive's Mix
- Supersonics: Caravan Palace
- Girls Just Want to Have Fun: Cyndi Lauper3
- Manic Monday: The Bangles
- We Built This City: Starship
- She Blinded me with Science: Thomas Dolby
- Music/Response: The Chemical Brothers4
- Bit rate variations in B Flat: Beck
- ss:st-shiro sagisu et: Satoshi Tomiie5
- In the Hall of the Mountain King: Grieg, as performed by the Seattle Orchestra
- Rhapsody in Blue: Gershwin
Actually Supersonics, by Caravan Palace. It's The Colorful Song to her because I showed her the video on a lark shortly afer it was released, and she thought it was just magical.
In all fairness, there was never any issue with my listening to the radio; it's just that compared to music actually in your possession, the radio is a very unreliable source of good music on demand.
Olive is very interested in what music actually means, these days. She knows that the words can mean something, but she hasn't really developed the listening skills to reliably follow everything on her own yet. After listening to this song just once, though, she was eager to explain it to me: "It means that kids just want to have fun!"
This one is The Robot Song in Olive's lexicon, and she accompanies it with an adorable stiff-armed robot dance that Christina taught her.
I can't say what the actual origin or title of this track is; it appears in my library as part of a mix called "When Hell is Full, the Dead will Rock the Earth". It doesn't look like a correct labeling, but I don't know enough to fix it, and as it has no lyrics, it's not really googleable. It's got a nice suspenseful tone, though, and Olive enjoys it.