May 8, 2003 - Thursday
I'm a musician and certainly understand the value of percussion in music. (It's the heart of rock 'n' roll, of course.) And, on the one hand, I'm delighted that Harry is presently bringing the same intensity and focus to his drumming as he once did to keyboards (and more keyboards). In this picture, you can see Jeremy's little hand reaching in to play this little five note piano, but it's really Harry who's using them both. Indeed, Harry's probably about to get upset that Jeremy is tenuously close to interrupting one of the four canned songs (Rockin' Robin, When Saints Go Marching In, Oh, Suzanna, and the charge song) that play automatically from this toy. Harry does this little set-up so he can play along with the songs one his drum. Apparently when his preschool plays "musical instruments" along with a teacher playing songs on the piano, Harry is very insistent on always playing the drum.

Today, I took both boys to a music store to buy guitar strings and a mic cable. It was kind of a gutsy move, letting two small boys relatively loose amid a store-ful of instruments. But, they are and were pretty well behaved, in this case at least long enough for me to find what I needed. After that I tried to show Harry some bongo drums, thinking he'd get a kick out of them and that they'd be safe for a 3-year-old boy to touch. But he was more interested in the cymbals and drum sets, especially one he found around the other side of the drum set area. It was a mini, child-size drum set and the contentious internal debate began.

"Harry would love it. I should support his new interest in drums if that's what he's choosing. I wonder how much something like this little set costs."
"Are you crazy?? Can you imagine listening to him bang away on those at all waking hours, and probably even non-waking hours? What instrument would be worse than the drums? Maybe a violin, but a violin would be quieter."
"I think I could live with violin if that's what Harry chose, though I'd probably push him toward viola or cello."


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