Bursting Into Song

K has had certain favorite songs for a while, but would never sing along. She liked to do the motions or dance a crazy dance while listening, but never sang herself more than a word or two: "twinkle twinkle", "prší prší", "kolo mlýnske".

But this month, that changed, and with very little lead-up. All of a sudden she was busting out with at least 3/4 of the lyrics to several different songs. I think the first one I noticed was a nearly complete rendition of "Wind the Bobbin Up", which was funny because that is a British one that we sing at playgroup but not at home. All of a sudden Wind the Bobbin Up became her favorite song, from which she likes to segue straight into the chorus of "Hokey Cokey" (she says "cokey cokey", the US version is "Hokey Pokey"). Those are part of our car songs now though, since she likes them so much!

She did start using more Slovak while Babka was here, but the most dramatic development was again in song. We were singing along to her Slovak children's CD - "Medveďku..." and suddenly she chimed in with "...daj labku!" We fell off our chairs and that song mysteriously and instantly jumped to the top of our repeat list. Hahaha.

Medveďku, daj labku.
Pôjdeme na svadbu.

Medvedica ráno vstala,
všetky deti vychystala

medveďku, daj labku.
Pôjdeme na svadbu.

The middle part is sung very fast, too fast for her to keep up, but she can do the slower repeated refrain. We sang a good deal on the trip to Edinburgh, including this one several times, and it was so funny to see how K watched my mouth VERY INTENTLY to get the rest of the words. Especially struggling to pronounce the "sv" in svatbu (she still has trouble putting two consonants together in either language). I talked with her a little about what the song is about, since it has words she doesn't know.

We sing this song a lot now, with us singing the first word and her jumping in to complete the rest of the chorus, then we sing the complicated middle part and she finishes off with the part she knows.

K also picked up on another song that Babka taught K/us while she was here. It even had hand motions, which is of course K's favorite type of song. K sings the first phrase and is working on learning the rest.

Nechcem ťa, nechcem ťa, nechcem ťa znať,
poď ku mne, poď ku mne, ručku mi dať,
pravú mi daj, ľavú mi daj,
a už sa na mňa nehnevaj!

I also heard Babka playing a game with K that involved telling a story and K filling in the missing parts, that coincidentally had K practicing some word endings. I need to get Apo to do something similar with her!

Overall singing has gotten a lot more interesting in our house since K started to chime in! And - best thing of all - she appears to have inherited my sense of pitch. My slightly tone-deaf husband and I have both been hoping for that!