Eli loves the Michigan Marching Band!

A few weeks ago, while at our house back in Canton, I decided on a whim to grab one of my old Michigan Marching Band yearbook VHS videos. I had picked up the videos from the years that I was in the band (1995, 1996, and 1997) several years earlier, but had never been able to watch them; they were very garbled when played in our VCR (even after playing with the tracking control).

When I got back to Mom and Dad K.’s house in Grand Rapids, to my surprise, the video worked perfectly! Also somewhat to my surprise – Eli loved it! He sat and watched most of the hour-plus-long video as I watched it with him and explained what the different instruments were, and the different shapes that the band was making with their formations. We even caught a couple of glimpses of Daddy marching!

Eli is really into the band now, which he shows us in various ways:

• He’ll bring me the one of the videos and say “Watch marching band movie, Daddy!” He also knows how to put the VHS tape into the VCR – perhaps a rarity among year 2007 2-year-olds? And I’ve found that for all of their faults as compared to DVDs – need to rewind, can’t easily skip around to different points of the tape – VHS tapes have the definite perk of being much more durable than DVDs, and unlike DVDs, I don’t need to worry about Eli handling the tapes. No need to worry about putting scratches on the hard plastic VHS tape!
  

Visual aid for 20 years from now when Eli has no idea what a VHS tape was:

• Eli will take two of the metal lids from his kitchen set and bang them together and say “cymbals”!
  
  
• Eli is starting to be able to pick out the sound of some instruments from music. On a couple of occasions, he’s heard some music on the radio or from one of his movies that has classical instrumentation, and he’ll say “trumpets!”
  
• Eli is getting into the Michigan spirit, too. We’ve caught him a couple of times walking around the house, saying “Hail, Hail!” and pumping his little fist in the air. When we’re watching a football game and I say “Touchdown!”, Eli will respond and say, rapid-fire, “Michigan Marching Band Touchdown!” And he definitely knows the sound of The Victors – I was outside in the front yard with my trumpet the other day demonstrating how to play it for my nephew Noah, and Missy told me later that Eli was inside saying “marching band! Marching band!”

Maybe Eli might be in the Michigan Marching Band himself someday? I don’t know what the future holds for him… but I would certainly be extremely proud if he was!