The most wonderful time of the year

Have you ever been in a church when its time for a song and the minister will say "Please stand as you are able and we will sing together." The requirement is not that you are able to sing but that you can stand...My son can stand.

Now don't get me wrong, he loves to sing but part of his auditory processing problem is that he cannot remember words. Then there is his apparent lack of innate ability which prevents him from carrying the tune. He can sometimes carry it; often during a song he carries several different tunes. Over the course of a song he uses more keys than a high school janitor- sometimes even the right one. When he finds the right key he has a lovely voice; and if heart and the joy of singing count for anything he is the next Pavarotti. He loves it and is beginning to make some progress at it.

This year a minor miracle happened. The very same music teacher who laughed and scoffed last year when I told her Dakota wanted to be a music teacher like her, asked him to be in the choir. You cannot believe what this meant to him-and to us. He is not easy to wrangle so this was quite an undertaking for her. I made a point of seeking her out and telling her what this has done for him and how proud it makes him.

So here we are at the Christmas season and its time for carols and school programs. Dakota has figured out that his penchant for endless repetition (often a symptom of autism) is very helpful in learning songs. He has also learned that his CD player has a repeat song button. The good news is that by listening to 'I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas' 500 times so far in December, he knows 80% of the words and stays on tune most of the time. The bad news is I think the hippo must have sat on or made off with the CD because I haven't seen it in a few days. Darn the luck :-)