Flamingos, yo-yos, and great music

Just a couple of quick notes tonight in my wakeful period between falling asleep with T and making it into my own bed. I was remembering that when I asked the sleepover girls to turn the overhead light off before bed and settle down to something quiet, they used the reading lamp to read to each other from P's dictionary. I couldn't hear much of what they were saying, but it was high hilarity for at least a few minutes.

This afternoon, P asked to watch Fantasia 2000 (which is totally worth a look if you haven't seen it.) T whined that he wanted to do something else, but he got sucked in right away, and they both watched the entire feature. T asked a lot of questions at first about what was going on, and then got quieter as the art became easier to understand. I still heard exclamations from time to time: "Peacocks!" when the flamingos came on, for example. (A flock of flamingos does a precisely coordinated dance to the finale from Camille Saint-Saëns's "Carnaval des Animaux"; one disruptive iconoclast plays with a yo-yo, to the consternation of the rest. Guess who gets the last laugh?) We told him they were flamingos, and he rolled the word around a few times, enjoying its sound. After the flamingos piece, I played them this video of real flamingos doing a mating dance.

I ran across this when a Facebook friend posted it last year. When I first saw Fantasia 2000, I didn't realize the lockstep flamingo dance was based on real behavior, so the YouTube video was both hilarious and an eye-opener.

When P first started enjoying Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 a couple of years ago, all orchestral music sounded the same to her. Whenever she heard orchestral music on the radio, she'd say it was the music from Bambi, or something from Fantasia. But with repeated viewings, she started being able to identify some of the music quite accurately. She can pick out Stravinsky's Firebird well before I can now -- I don't recognize it until the main motif rolls around -- so I know she's really taking in the music, not just the images. I wish Disney had stuck with their original plan for Fantasia to be a frequently re-released movie with ever-changing pieces included. It's such a fun way to introduce young ones to great music.

What I learned while writing this post: "disruptive iconoclast" is, more or less, redundant. Also, Flamenco in Spanish (my working title until I looked it up to check), if Wikipedia can be trusted -- which is a valid question given the lack of sourcing on this particular matter -- doesn't mean flamingo, but Flemish (and may refer to gypsies). I feel better now about the lack of similarity between Flamenco dance and flamingo dance. I still wonder (but not enough to look it up in the middle of the night) about the connection between Flanders and Gypsies/Romany people.