Over the past couple of months our son has started to really enjoy the sounds of musical instruments. What started out as an interest in the big guitars leaned up against the wall (that at the time were off limits) and the piano keys that he couldn’t reach has slowly turned into a genuine enjoyment of sound itself. Even if he’s listening to one of those crazy battery-powered jingles coming from a plastic toy shaped like a home appliance he instantly stops when he hears the sound of a live instrument. One strum of the guitar and he gets up and leaves his blinking toy behind.
There’s something about the natural sound that makes him interested. He can see how it works. Much like the wooden blocks he can bang together to make a sound (or bang on the floor, or the door, or something breakable) the guitar and the piano respond to his touch in ways that make sense. The piano with its buttonlike structure made more sense than the guitar initially. At first he thought that placing his hand on the fretboard of the guitar would produce a sound. It took him a couple of weeks to discover that he had to pull and then release the string for it to make a sound. He had to let go.
The guitar has since become his instrument of choice. I leave them near the floor where he has access to them and he casually strums the open strings several times a day. Sometimes he indicates that I should make the guitar make sounds and I do. All of this access to the musical instrument led to a strange realization one morning when the jingle of the guitar was not coming from the strings. Inside the guitar I found his little toothbrush. It was cute… and it sounds like a country song: the toothbrush in my guitar.