Like Father, Like Son

We, the typical proud parents, are pretty impressed with our two-year-old boy and his perceptiveness. He just seems to notice things we don’t expect him to notice. When I took an unusual turn driving home from school yesterday, he asked, “Why we go this way?” But we’re his parents and we’re unabashedly biased (as are most American parents) to think our kid’s a genius.

This evening, however, we got undeniable proof that Sawyer is an exceptionally observant two-year-old (or at least that he's spent a lot of time around sound recording equipment in his two years). We were watching the Fox News coverage of the inauguration online, since we don’t have TV, and explaining to Lee Anna a little bit about the way Americans choose their president every four years. Sawyer saw the new president making his speech and asked, “Why he have two of ‘em?” His English isn’t perfect, but he did notice that on the Presidential Podium there are two microphones. WHAT??? I half expected him to ask if those were Shure SM-57 mics like all the other presidents have used for speeches, but he didn’t go that far.

So I explained to him, as best I could, that the sound techs probably put two mics there just as a back-up, fool-proof system with intentional redundancy so that if one of the mics or its cable had problems transmitting the speech, the other one would keep working and we’d still hear. I’m not sure he was still with me by the end of the sound engineering lesson, but we were impressed nonetheless with Sawyer’s mad observation skills.