This morning when we were getting ready for school and work, Dillon serenaded me with "twinkle twinkle little star" (completely unprompted) and then he asked me to sing him a song. For whatever reason (or perhaps because i was listening to the Temptations greatest hits cd yesterday) the song, "My Girl" popped into my head. I sang the beginning, and when I got to the refrain "I guess you’d say what can make me feel this way, My Girl" Dillon jumped in with the tenor "My Girl!", and sang the rest of the song with me. That kind of amazed me because I’ve never sung that song to him before. He’s just picked it up from the shuffle of the 2,000 songs on my iPod or whatever.
It just reminded me how much kids pick up when you think they aren’t listening. A couple of days ago he was taking a bath, and I went into his bedroom to get out pjs, and I heard him bust out at full bathtub volume, "Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart, you’re blahblahblah ma mah na da da…" And then he just sang that line over and over in a totally endearing way, really feeling soulful about his heart breaking.
I’ve been reading this book, "Toddler Adoption: The Weaver’s Craft," which is really interesting, although possibly geared a bit towards those people in the process of deciding to (or not to) adopt a toddler (at least the first sixty pages are, anyway). But one part talks about how many adopted toddlers are extremely developmentally delayed when they are first placed with their forever families. Like, our new daughter may not be able to speak or walk or things like that. And it talks about how quickly those things come once the child has found a home. Many of the adoptive parents talk about a miracle, an extraordinary occurence where one moment their child was not walking, and the next moment he was. And it just resonates with me so much because it surprises me every day how much Dillon knows, what he picks up, and how he retains and recalls information that he asks us and may not even seem like he’s paying attention to the answer.
Somewhere right now, there’s a little girl quietly (or not so quietly) absorbing things, hanging back, waiting for us to come and pick her up so she can amaze the hell out of us.