Prodigies

Back in October, the Wall Street Journal ran an affecting article on 8-year-old Alma Deutscher, a remarkable English girl who recently issued a CD of her violin music - which she herself composed. But the CD, it turns out, was only the latest in a string of remarkably precocious accomplishments. Before she was two, Alma sang with perfect pitch, and at 3 she had begun to play her first violin. "She's able," said Robert Gjerdingen, a music professor at Northwestern, "to think music."

Here at halfstep, we're pretty impressed with our own little girl. To be sure, though, we haven't seen any signs of such remarkably early development. Like most four-year-olds, Cleo is learning to spell her first words. She can play by herself for sustained periods of time, but still wears a Pull-Up at night. And, like most of her peers, she may not be able to think music, but she can certainly think ice cream.

But from another perspective, it all seems somehow precocious. L. and I still sometimes see her, in our mind's eye, as the tiny baby who struggled to roll over. And so it still feels truly remarkable to see her walking home, alone, from the meadow at the end of our block when, tired of snow, she wants to warm up. I'm slightly amazed when she uses words like confident or unconscious. And I can verge on the overwhelmed when I open the front door on Valentine's Day and discover this:

So, Cleo, you may not have a CD yet. The violin still feels many moons away. But you are, like your entire tribe of little ones, prodigious.