Lucas Camilo

The dino family RV is back! But this time the destination (and nicknames) don’t have anything to do with dinosaurs. Allow Lucas to explain:

i am leaving reef town in less than a week

we are going to the redwoods.

in an Rv the same one as last summer

we are going to see our friends daniella, & gabe & rafi

& layla.

i am excited about the realy big trees

i bet ripple will miss his 499 or shoughd i say 498

beacause 66 is lost & gone.

Hmmm… that probably didn’t make that much sense after all. You see, last year when we traveled to Canada and Montana in a wheelchair-accessible RV Lucas was still completely obsessed with dinosaurs. So we all gave ourselves dinosaur names and made dinosaur road trip shirts. 10 months later he’s moved on from his obsession with Dinosaur Train the TV show and has a new favorite: another PBS kids show called Splash and Bubbles. So now we’re all characters from that show — Splash (Lucas), Bubbles (Ida), Dunk (Krista) and Ripple (Burke) — and Lucas is pretty militant about us only calling each other these names. In fact he’s been insisting that everyone at school call him Splash too. All these characters live in a section of the ocean called Reef Town and sing somewhat annoying songs like “Reeftown Rangers” and “Rhythm of the Reef.” My character Ripple is a sea horse who has 499 brothers, one of whom (#66) is always missing. I hope that helps you decipher Lucas’s blog post!

Anyway, we’re heading out on Friday and will make it as far south as Leggett, California, in the heart of the redwoods. Some friends from the Bay Area are coming up to meet us and hang out, which should be a blast. And Lucas will be blogging (just like last summer) so look out for some updates over the weekend and all next week!

If you’re a long-time reader of Lucas’s blog you’ll remember than way back when Lucas was a baby — struggling with frequent, complicated health issues — he had already developed a deep appreciation of music. You could see it in his eyes when a song he loved came on; there were certain ones (I’m thinking Elizabeth’s Mitchell’s “Three Little Birds” and They Might be Giants “Pictures of Pandas Painting Penguins”) that we had to play over and over again at Lucas’s request. Then there was the Caspar Babypants period around 3 years old when all we could play in the van was Seattle’s local punk-rocker turned kids musician, especially his version of Pete Seeger’s “Mister Rabbit.”

For a kid with very limited ability to move his body and get around, listening to music is one of those things that is perfectly suited to his way of being… he just needs to demand enough times that we turn on his favorite album and then he can just kick back and enjoy it. (In fact, now his iPad is set up so that he can choose all of his own songs and albums which takes things to another level.)

It’s especially wonderful is that he’s passed on this love of music to his sister, and Ida will sometimes sit on the couch by Lucas singing along to one of his favorite songs… because she, like the rest of us, has heard it so many times. She also loves the old classics, as evidenced by this recent performance by the lake that I caught on video:

Lucas’s current favorite medium for music are his self-crafted playlists, which he constructs around a specific theme and calls “greatest hits.” The first (of course!) was Lucas’s Dinosaur Greatest Hits, released in late 2015 to critical acclaim. Next up was Bugs Greatest Hits released in 2016, followed by the Ocean Greatest Hits (parts 1 and 2) released in early 2017. Lately his been on a role, having released Lucas’s Space Greatest Hits, Little Critters Greatest Hits, Big Critters Greatest Hits, Birds Greatest Hits and Vehicle Greatest Hits — all in the last 2 months! The album cover for the space album is included for your pleasure, and all of these are available as CDs (if you still own a CD player) complete with track listings. They are expansive, masterful compilations of children’s songs, if I do say so myself.

Lucas not only loves to listen to music but increasingly enjoys singing. We’ve been part of the Columbia City family choir since 2014 but when we first joined Lucas didn’t sing along very often (here’s a previous blog post about Lucas and music that talks about our early days in the choir). Now he often pipes up and shouts out his favorite songs, and not just at choir. He has the uncanny ability to memorize song lyrics after just a few listens, and can often be heard singing to himself while resting on the couch after a long day at school, or in bed at 6 am while waiting for his parents to wake up. On those occasions I’ll come into his room, half awake, and he’ll say “Daddy! I was just thinking about the Little Critters Album and how the monkey section should come after the frog section but before the racoon section!” “Sounds good, buddy,” I say as I snuggle next to Lucas in a fruitless attempt to get him to go back to sleep. “It’s your album. But can we wait until the sun comes up to work on it?”

One of Lucas’s recent discoveries (thanks to the Seattle Public Library) are the Sandra Boynton albums that come from some of her famous books, in particular “Philadelphia Chickens” and the country album “Frog Trouble.” The other day Lucas and I decided to record ourselves singing some of the songs and here are a few clips, including Ida’s favorite song “Snuggle Puppy.”