I'm afraid I don't have a deeply insightful or delightfully funny story to tell this week, but I do have one cool thing that happened with Ben this week. It's a tiny little thing, but it made me smile.

We were in the car going somewhere or other, and Ben was listening to Disney music (I know! Shocking!!). I had let him plug his iPod into the car stereo, and so I was being treated to the soundtrack to Pocahontas. (God, I still remember the night we took Ben to see that movie in the theater, up in Bellingham, WA. Ben would only have been two years old at the time, and it would be the last time he would sit through an entire movie in a movie theater for many, many years.)  So anyway, there we are listening to the opening track from Pocahontas, "In sixteen-hundred-seven, we sailed the ocean free...."

If you are not intimately familiar with the opening of the movie, it begins with the song set in England done in period style to introduce the anglo characters, and then it transitions into "Steady as the Beating Drum" set in pre-colonial Virgina done in Native American style to introduce Pocahontas' tribe. I have no idea how historically accurate either of the songs are stylistically, but artistically they do an excellent job of introducing the two worlds that are about to clash. The English fanfare is all brass,  fife and drum, with a rousing adventurist chorus all about "Glory, God, and gold ... ", where the Native American piece is set against a simple drumbeat with lyrics all about being in tune with the land and honoring tradition, "Seasons go and seasons come, steady as the beating drum, plum to seed to bud to plum ... "

So there's Ben, listening to this almost primal drumbeat, when out of the blue he reaches over and takes my hand. He does that sometimes when we are driving, takes my right hand and places it on his leg and holds it there. This time, however, he grasps my hand and starts tapping it on his leg in time with the drumbeat. Tap ... tap ... tap ... tap... " ... steady as the beating drum ..."

He has never, ever done that with me before. As much as he listens to music, I have seen him actually notice the rhythm of the songs. It seems such a simple thing, we as humans just naturally tap our feet or bob our heads in time to music, but Ben doesn't really do that. Possibly it is because he tends to listen to things in small fragments, just five seconds here and ten seconds there, rarely taking in an entire song as its own entity. But on that morning he listened all the way through "Steady as the Beating Drum" several times while tapping along with my hand on his leg.

Then he seemed to realize something, make some kind of connection, and he flipped over to the Fantasia soundtrack. As the familiar bassoon lilted through The Sorcerer's Apprentice, again Ben held my hand and deliberately tapped along in time, feeling the underlying pulse of the music. He started laughing, and prompted me to sing along with the tune -- "Bump bump, ba ba ba Bump ba Bump ba Bump ba Bump Bump Bump ... "

Some days I feel like I get these milestones all jumbled up and out of order. Or, as The Doctor would say, all timey-wimey and wibbly-wobbly. Bouncing along to music should have been happening fifteen years ago or more. And yet, there is such a simple and pure joy to see my son enjoy feeling the underlying pulse and heartbeat of his favorite music.

Steady as the beating drum ... seasons go and seasons come ... walk in balance all our days ...