Hockey “Song Away”

My almost-three-year-old daughter started pre-school last week, and I had the first of what I assume will be many experiences with her exponentially growing world of knowledge:

She sang a song that she didn’t learn at home.

For those of you who don’t have kids, this doesn’t sound like a big deal.

And for those of you who have slightly older kids, you might not remember benchmark as particularly monumental.

But for us, for today, it was a landmark, a stunning experience.

For literally her entire life, thus far, anything she has learned, and regurgitated, has come from within our Family. It might be a story from a Grandparent or a trick she picked up from TV. But everything she’s ever learned, is something that we can locate the origin of, within our own home and family.

Starting now, she’ll take in ideas, actions, references and knowledge from a world beyond our home address. She’s going to learn from teachers and coaches and classmates and friends and enemies and strangers and public personalities.

She’s going to repeat these things at home, and inevitably, with some of it, we’ll say, “Where did she learn that?”

My sister posted on Facebook last week, saying that she was in the car with her 3 kids, ages 7, 5 and 2 ½, and “Song Away” came on the radio. All three of them sang along to the song, though my sister wasn’t familiar with it. They hadn’t learned it from their dad either.

Where did they learn it?

It’s a big mysterious world of influences out there.