C and Katy reciting The Big Red Barn

In the spring of 2004 my mom and Chris’s mom came to visit. Mom bought C a cute little book called The Big Red Barn, and C has loved it. This summer I discovered that C actually knew much of it by heart. Once, in the car, I was trying to distract him by reciting it for him, but I hesitated on a line and he finished it for me. I was floored. Since then we’ve worked on it together and he knows practically the whole thing, though he won’t always say it. I tried to get him to go through the whole thing, but he got sidetracked in the middle so it’s two movies, with some of the poem missing in the middle. Sorry that I sound kind of like a diabolically saccherine kindergarten teacher…

In this movie, he just finishes the lines for me, but now he can do a lot of the lines all by himself. The poem starts “By the big red barn in the great green field, there was a pink pig who was learning to squeal. There was a great big horse and a very little horse, and on every barn is a weather vane of course, a golden flying horse.” He’s always had a problem with the weather vane, since this is really his only experience with the things. He has variously called it gibberish, “weather barn” and “weather horse”.

Here’s the end of the poem. The last lines are “And there they were, all night long, sound asleep in the big red barn. Only the mice were left to play, rustling and squeaking in the hay, while the moon sailed high in the dark night sky”