Imagined soundtrack

If Cleo's life thus far were made into a film, I think it's fair to say that much of the footage of her first year would be accompanied by a predominantly restrained classical soundtrack. That year proceeded, for the most part, at a slow and stately pace: I remember a lot of lying next to Cleo as she rolled gently on her belly, and I remember longish walks with her in the Baby Bjorn. A soft piano etude - the sort that documentaries on The Nature Channel use when showing time-lapse imagery of a flower growing - might work well.

Right now, though, the images demand something livelier and less predictable: bee-bop jazz, I think. Yesterday morning offers a nice example. We sat down to a relatively rare formal family breakfast: each of us had a little bowl of cereal, and Cleo was armed with tiny spoon and bib. Within two minutes, though, she had used the spoon to chop the cereal into hundreds of tiny pieces, and then somehow turned herself entirely around in her chair, so that she looked like a prisoner on a hunger strike, ignoring her meal and staring through the back rails, as if in a cell. It was like eating with Houdini, perhaps - and biographies of Houdini, of course, always get the Jazz Age treatment.

Each age, then, gets the soundtrack it deserves. But when, I wonder, do we get to the glam metal phase?