My Little Songbird

Last summer, I took a weekend class to teach a music program called "Melody Hounds" at my workplace. We finally incorporated the program into our schedule and I help teach it twice a week now. It is based off of a PBS show called "Lomax the Hound of Music", but unfortunately our local PBS stations have not begun airing it. You can see videos, hear music, and see clips from the show at www.melodyhounds.com.

On Tuesday, I decided to bring Jorryn with me since I was going to be the assistant that day. The program is designed for children 3-7 years, but since Jorryn has been strongly exposed to music, I suspected that she would fit in to the program well.

Sure enough, she got right into it. Our biggest hurdle was a bit of shyness on her part, but she didn't run off and play with the toys and she participated in every activity! After we ended and went back to childcare, Jorryn ran up to my coworker and started talking really fast. "Fun with the music! Singing! Fun with ribbons and Miss Nikki and coloring!" My coworker had no idea what she had just said, but it was obvious to me that Jorryn had a lot of fun. Later that night, after we got home, I was changing Jorryn's diaper when she said, "I liked it, Mama! I liked it singing with the music!" It was so wonderful to see how excited she was!

Oh and the last activity in the program involves listening to a "songtale" and drawing a picture about the song and Jorryn was so excited about drawing a picture with the crayola markers that she paraded her picture around all night long and insisted that we post it on the refrigerator (which we were going to do anyways.)

She was so excited about the program that I decided to check out their website and so we sat together and started playing the music videos. We ended up sitting there for thirty minutes and then when John came home, we all sat for yet another thirty minutes, listening to all the songs over and over again. It was great! But then when it was time for Jorryn to go to bed, she threw a tantrum, because she wanted to keep listening to the music!

As a final thought, I wanted to mention that Jorryn's new line is "Just one more time". She wanted to listen to it "just one more time, Mum". That's her other new word. She now calls me "Mum". I have absolutely no idea where she got that name for me. It makes me sad... I still want to be known as Mama.