February 12, 2001 - Monday
I love this. And, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it shows Harry's brain is working on many levels: rote learning, creative association, and humor.

Harry has a book called "How to Scare a Lion." It's about a lion in the circus who gets the hiccups and how he and his trainer try to figure out how to scare the hiccups away so the lion doesn't lose control amidst their live act and bite off the trainer's head. On recent readings, and as a way to keep Harry entertained during our commute, his mother has been embellishing the story by roaring out load as the lion might do through the course of the book. Harry thinks this - and barking sounds she makes for another story - are very funny and has now started to mimic the roaring by tilting back his little head and letting out a "rrrr" with his high pitched voice. It's very cute.

The excellent part, though, came last night as we were looking through a photo album of a trip his mother and I took several years ago to the National Zoo in Washington. Over the last few weeks, Harry has been in the habit of retrieving any number of our mini-photo albums from a shelf conveniently right at his head level. Sometimes he'll just pulled them all off the shelf and onto the floor, though he'll often select one and bring it to the middle of the room and page through it. The trouble is that he sometimes has more enthusiasm than grace when flipping through the pages, so we often try to help him through them. Anyway, last evening we were looking at the various animals in the zoo and Harry was doing a bang up job identifying them. He got the black bear right off: "burr" as soon as we turned the page. He copied his mother and me saying "auger" for tiger. He adamantly labeled the elephant as "cat," something of a mystery we have yet to solve. And, he even tried "mu" for the emu. But, the real thrill was turning to the picture of a lion, a somewhat distant photograph that apparently resembled the cartoon drawing in his book enough to have Harry lift his head and say "rrrrr."


Comments, opinions?