Lennie’s on the verge of saying “da da.” A couple of months ago, we thought she was going to be an early talker. When I’d bend over her while changing her diaper and coo “hello,” she would often coo back without proper pronunciation but with just about the right intonation. She also had started exploring the real estate of her mouth. I was sure she’d have a word or two by now. In just the last couple of days, she’s started articulating a lot more in her babbling. She warms up with some bah bah bahs and then rolls her tongue back a little to add in a hint of ell. As her tongue rolls further back, her lips come apart and she articulates a sound sort of between a bah and a dah with an ell still tucked in there. Sometimes it sounds very much as if she’s saying da da. I know better than to think she’s really trying to call me by the name I recite to her a few hundred times a day, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Hands down, I’m the beatbox champion of the Learn Houston household. We haven’t had a showdown or anything (yet), but I find that the sputtery skills I cultivated as a boy serve me well in adulthood. Sometimes, you see, there is simply nothing that will make Lennie happy but being beatboxed to. Strange but true. At times, no amount of belly-getting, silly-song-singing, cooing, or airplaning will quiet her down. When all of these things have failed, we know there’s nothing left to do but to beatbox. Mleeka has to do this pretty frequently in the car, when she’s riding in the back with an upset Lennie whose belly is inaccessible, who can’t be airplaned at the moment, and who isn’t responding to any vocal pacifiers.

Mleeka’s beatboxing, for all the good it actually does for Lennie (it often quiets her down), is all frontal and thus lacks depth. That is, she fills her mouth with air and spits out roughly uniform little splats of air until she runs out. Having made somewhat of a study of beatboxing as an adolescent, I happen to know that better technique is required of a beatbox master. True and proper beatboxing requires frequent inhalation of air, some use of the vocal chords, and strict attention to rhythm, lip position and firmness, and modulation of airflow. And while I am by no means a beatbox master, I believe I have a more polished beatbox presentation than Mleeka.

Sadly, I also have stage fright and so have performed only private shows for Lennie. These few shows have been my first beatbox performances in easily 15 years, and so it stands to reason that I’d be a little rusty. But my little family shouldn’t be too surprised if, one day, I come home from work a free man, having quit my job to don multifarious gold chains and dental prosthetics, a puffy jacket, and a hip-hop toboggan to fulfill my calling as a human beatbox.

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