Also While Driving Around With Kent: Fyo Gets His First Lesson in Civics

Fyo loves several things about my sister, his Auntie Sis, but most of all he loves her for her iPhone. When Auntie Sis visited us in Bali, she showed him her "Cowbell" application. He ran around the house tapping on her iPhone to make the cowbell noise. This last visit from Auntie Sis she showed him "Coy Pond" so he could watch all the fish.

Except that when watching the fish, he'd always hit the button to turn the fish off. Sis shortly grew tired of this game, setting him up with Coy Pond only to have him hit the button that turned it off. She moved onto the next of her iPhone applications: The U.S. Constitution.

She started reading Fyo the Constitution. Fyo said, "Sing?".

Sis said, "I don't know if I can sing it. The language is so yadda yadda wadda wadda."

But she did. She sang the Constitution to my son. Kent and I were rather impressed. We joked the Constitution could be the source for a new musical. At one point she paused to point out the beauty of the language and the eloquence of one sentence in particular.

"Listen," she said, "this one sentence is beautiful." When my sister (or anyone for that matter) says such things it makes the heart of the English teacher in me go all a flutter.  She is right of course; the beauty and construction of the language in the Constitution lends itself perfectly to admiring, pondering, savoring and diagramming in order to admire it at a more profound level. Diagramming the sentences in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is the kind of thing I used to do as a form of meditation (back when I had that kind of time).

Fyo, however,  didn't want any part of the admiring the language. He just yelled, "SING!" So she did. He liked her singing the U.S. Constitution more than he likes my singing of "You Are My Sunshine" or that I love you song we learned from our friend Francesca. He bobbed his head and danced in his car seat the way he does when we play music that he likes.

Lesson learned from Auntie Sis: just like it's never too early to start reading to your child, it's never too early to begin your child's Constitution literacy.