Billy Joel’s Lullaby (Goodnight, My Angel) was one of Maya’s favorites even when she was just a few weeks old. When she was hardly three months old, she hummed the entire song, accompanying me as I sang to her (the video is about three minutes long).
As she started to speak, she has developed a rather mellifluous, sing song voice that sounds delightful (at least to her family and friends). And of late, she’s resumed her accompaniment to songs. One jetlagged night in India, Maya was listening to Genesis’ “Hold On My Heart” playing on my laptop while I was occupied in another room. At 4 am in the morning, I heard her suddenly go “Ahhh be they” in synchronicity to Phil Collins’ singing “I will be there”. Since that night, she’s started humming to other songs, her favorite being “Soul Meets Body” by that strangely named group, Death Cab For Cutie. She loves to lip synch the “Para Para Pa Pa” piece of the song as well as the repetition of the chorus of the title, “Where soul meets body”.
Among the many children’s books that one of our close friends gave us (books their kids had grown past) was a nursery rhyme book. Maya loved hearing us recite the rhymes, demanding us to do so endlessly. Last October, she christened the book, “Baa, Baa, Bashee” in honor of the first poem “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”.
In the last couple of weeks, she has started to recite most of the rhymes in the book in her own funny way. As we recite each rhyme, she recites the rhyme with us, speaking the first and last word of each line clearly and filling in the space between them with sounds that she passes off as words. Very particular about the order in which the rhymes are recited – they must be recited in the order they’re in the book – she protests if we mixup the order and frowns if we refer to the book to correct the order. Here is a video that I took about two weeks ago of her reciting a few of the rhymes with her mother.
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