importance of music

Our home has always been a place of music: I can function better, I think, with music in the background if not the foreground. I sing going about my day or have music playing. Our girls have the passion and talent for instrumental as well as vocal music. Ben seems to be no different in that respect. We expect he has a better sense of pitch than we do.
I remember when he was just learning to talk(that took a long time, which I'll explain in another post), Ben at two would sing with me as he took his bath. I started out by singing "Old McDonald" and other preschool songs to him. He picked them up more quickly than he was learning to speak. He watched Veggie Tale shows which had catchy tunes. Those became some of his favorite songs to sing. One of his special teachers who came to the house a couple times a week to work with him told us a funny incident related to his singing. She was listening to her pastor one Sunday tell the story of Daniel being required to bow down to the idol. She almost started laughing because she kept thinking of , "The bunny. The bunny. Oh I love the bunny!", a line from a veggie tale song about the same story that Ben had repeatedly sung to her.
Ben doesn't usually want to sing with others or want others to sing with him. We often wondered if he just had sensitive hearing/sense of pitch so that when he sang with others he could hear the out of tune singers and it bothered him. Recently, he has watched(over and over and OVER) a video of instrumental music "played on" computer graphic instruments(animusic). One tune only was not written for the project and Ben insisted that he recognized it. So everyone he knew who might be musical he hummed the tune to and asked if they knew it. His voice is dropping into a more adult range at this time, so he was having trouble humming in the key in which it is played on the video, but he would not change keys to make it easier on himself. He sings it like he hears it.
This morning on the way to church he started singing words from several of our worship songs to one of the animusic tunes.
His music teachers have consistently reported that he can keep a constant beat; helpful since he played percussion for 5 years, only opting out of band this year to continue taking French( a story for another day also). Either he will incorporate music into his career or at least into his life as an adult I am sure.