Andy Goes to Preschool

Andy started preschool!  He's going two mornings a week for two-and-a-half hours, and he gets to ride the school bus, which he thinks is great fun.   (Buses are cool!)



Here he is all conked out after his first day.  All that excitement is exhausting.

We had Andy evaluated through Child Find for his speech issues (I'm not exactly clear on what Child Find is, but something through the schools) and he qualified to get some help through the preschool program. What he has isn't technically a delay, since delay means that the child is still developing normally but behind schedule. In Andy's approach to communication he seems to be trying to come at it from the other side. He's reading like crazy, and he chatters away reciting things that he's memorized (over and over and over), but it's more like he's practicing talking than actually using it to communicate. If we want him to say something we have to write it down and get him to read it. This is definitely atypical. At school he'll be working with a speech specialist.  We hope he enjoys it!

A is for Andy

Andy writes letters on the Magna-Doodle.  He'll write the whole alphabet in order now.  Some of his letters are endearingly wonky.



Last night Doug was writing things like "draw a circle," "draw a triangle," and Andy was reading it and doing it.  He is doing a little better with the talking thing--he chatters all the time, repeating things that he's memorized, but doesn't do much synthesizing to actually communicate verbally.  If there's something we want him to say we still have better luck writing it down and getting him to read it.  He sure is cute, though.  We love listening to him chatter and sing. 

Andy sings the алфавит

Our little hyperlexic boy loves watching alphabet videos on youtube. He has quite a collection of alphabet songs in English now (ending in "zee" or "zed") and he's even been branching out to non-English alphabets. He has a couple in Spanish and French that he has memorized, and this one in Russian. He was singing along with it the other day and it was so cute we just had to get a video.

For a long time he would just kind of chant along with the songs, but in the past couple of months he's started really singing. (With, you know, actual notes.) We love his cute little voice.

(I did take a semester of Russian, once upon a time... the only things I know how to say are "I am very glad that you are in the USSR," "Where is your husband?" and "I am a puppy." )

Andy's Alphabet

Andy's fascination with letters continues. We have these wooden letters (from a Melissa and Doug set) that Andy likes to line up on the floor, over and over and over. He's been spending quite a lot of time lining up letters. He'll complete the alphabet, then come and get me and I sing it for him while he points to the letters, and then he starts over again.



I'm impressed that he never gets the b,d,p, and q mixed up.

He also picked up the sign language alphabet from watching videos on youtube. We got this video of him finger-spelling himself to sleep on Daddy's lap.

Letter Boy

Andy has learned all his letter sounds.  He's been interested in letters for quite a while, and went through a couple of weeks where all he wanted to do was have us write the alphabet over and over.  Then he started saying a few sounds, and before we knew it he was saying all of them.  Or almost all of them, I should say--he still has a little trouble with Q and X.

Besides learning from Mom and Dad, he also got a lot of reinforcement from starfall.com and the LeapFrog Letter Factory video. I think that's how he ended up saying the sounds rather than the names of the letters.  Kate really enjoyed both of these too.

Sometimes when we're driving somewhere, he'll sit there in his car seat and say all the letter sounds to himself.  In order.  He seems quite pleased with himself.  And when we're having dinner and he's sitting in his highchair, he'll look up at the bookshelf and start picking out random letters.  We think it's hilarious that he still doesn't talk but apparently he's trying to read.



Andy also learned to use the computer mouse about a week before he turned two.   Kate learned to point and click in July (when she was two-and-a-half).  Andy got her beat by over six months.  I think he was highly motivated.



"Ooh, Mom's got her camera.  I must look at it!"



He likes to draw on my graphics tablet, too.  I've seen him sit like this with the pen in his left hand and his right hand on the mouse.  Ambidextrous and ready to go to work.

Now he's working on learning numbers. He says "One! Two! Eight!" It's just too cute.

Andy at 15 months

Taken today! Check out those scrapes and bruises. He's a busy boy. Today he figured out how to climb onto the kitchen chairs. He wanted to continue his ascent onto the kitchen table, but was thwarted in the attempt.



I couldn't decide between these two pictures, so I just included both of them.

Kate was saying twenty or so words at 15 months. (I hear girls often start talking sooner.) Andy pretty much just says "hi." The other day Doug's cell phone rang, and Andy put his hand up to his ear and said, "Hi!" That was so cute. He's doing signs for "more," "all done," and "milk," and he understands things like "lie down" and "you want a bath?" He also likes to sit and look at books by himself. He'll turn the pages and say "dooka dooka dooka" over and over.

Andy is such a happy little guy and so fun to have around!

Our budding graphic novelist

Kate learned about speech bubbles from Elephant and Piggie. Sometimes she'll draw a bubble and then tell us what she want us to write in it, but she did these all by herself. There's a "no" and a "yes," and I think there's a "help" in there too, but it got a bit squished. (I'm not sure what's going on in this picture, but it seems to involve arguing.)

Kate continues to surprise us with her reading. The other night she sat down and read The Foot Book all the way through (not having seen it for a couple of years), and only needed help with maybe four words. She has some pretty proud parents. Unfortunately she can't go to Kindergarten until next year, since she has to be five before school starts.

Three-year-old humor

Kate has been reciting "Hey-Diddle-Diddle," and when she gets to the end, instead of "the dish ran away with the spoon," she says, "and the man ran away with the fork." and then laughs hysterically. Every time. (Sometimes, to really shake things up, she says, "The horse jumped over the sun.") It is fun to see her coming up with her own substitutions.

She's also decided that the "Suffering till Suffrage" song on Schoolhouse Rock is hilarious. The other day she wanted to watch it over and over and just kept laughing at it. I'm pretty sure it's not meant to be humorous.

I mentioned that Kate has been developing more narrative structure in her play--she's also started adding dialog tags. Like, "'I'm hungry!' said the rubber dragon, 'I need some dragon treats!'" Last night when Doug was getting her to bed she was in full story mode with her animal toys and just chattering away. When I took her sippy cup to her, she said, "'Oh, thank you!' said Kate, as she put down her sippy cup and began to drink." She's definitely synthesizing a lot from the stories we read together. (Sometimes she says, "said me," or "said him," which we think is very cute.)

"More medicine!"

This is not a post about medicine. This is actually a post about cinnamon. We have recently discovered that Kate really likes cinnamon, but she keeps calling it medicine. I suppose "cinnamon" and "medicine" might sound kind of similar, if you're not too familiar with either word. We have been correcting her, figuring it's probably a good idea to understand what medicine is and is not, but it hasn't sunk in yet. Tonight she asked for "more applesauce and medicine."

In the meal where the cinnamon was first introduced, Kate was having applesauce and horchata (a Mexican rice drink), which both go well with cinnamon, but she was also having a bit of a lime drink that Doug shared with her, and she wanted cinnamon in that too. She still sometimes asks for "lime juice and medicine." We try to tell her that lime and cinnamon don't really go together, but as they say, there's no accounting for taste.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

I'm often impressed by Kate's resourcefulness in getting her point across. There are still times, though, when her clueless parents just can't figure it out.

The other night we were watching The Incredibles after dinner --that is to say, Doug and I had finished eating and left the table, and Kate was still sitting in her high chair playing with her food. (She does that a lot. An oft-repeated question at our house is, "Are you eating that applesauce, or just playing in it?") As she sat there making snake noises and slithering her spaghetti noodles around on her tray, she looked up and pointed, and said, "Want the sheep? The white sheep?" The only sheep I could think of was the little wooden one that came with her train, so I found that and held it up. "Did you want this?" I asked. She shook her head "No!" then looked thoughtful for a moment, and said, "The dancing sheep?" "Ah!" I said, as the light dawned, "You want to watch Boundin'?" I was impressed that she remembered that Boundin' went with The Incredibles. (We hadn't watched either recently.)

That time I was able to figure out what she wanted fairly quickly. Other times I'm not so lucky. Recently Kate was asking for "the bouncing ball on the computer," and I just could not for the life of me figure out what she was talking about. I even called Doug at school (between classes) and he couldn't figure it out either. So Kate was, perforce, bouncing-ball-less. Then, several days later, she was on my lap while I was shutting down the computer, and when I got down to the desktop she suddenly lunged toward the screen, pointed at an icon and cried, "It's the bouncing ball!" Oh, that's the bouncing ball. It's this game called DXBall. So she played that for a few minutes. She can't really do it, but hey, she's having a good time. She also recently asked for "Big Ideas" which we eventually discovered was The Three Caballeros (and not, as we at first thought, perhaps something to do with Veggie Tales). I don't know where she got that from. Big Ideas. Three Caballeros. Nope, I'm just not seeing it.

Doug pointed out today that Kate is saying "carrots" now and not "darrots." Alas, for the fleeting ways of babyhood.

"I need more letters!"

Since I posted less than two months ago about Kate recognizing a few letters, she has learned the entire alphabet and the sounds that the letters make. She just loves letters. One of her favorite things to do is go out and paint letters on the porch (with water). I make the letters and then she comes along behind me and traces over them--or sometimes she traces the lines pretty well, and sometimes she kind of colors them in--and when she gets to the end she says, "I need more letters! I love letters!" (Doug once, when asked for more letters, gave her a thorn and eth. I told him not to confuse her.)

We got this Leapfrog video out of the library, that has a little song (to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell") that goes, "The A says aah, the A says aah, every letter makes a sound, the A says aah!" and goes through every letter of the alphabet. Sometimes we sing it together while we're painting. (Kate still has her pronunciation quirks, so some of the sounds don't come out quite right, but she knows what they are.) She can also identify the letters just fine in isolation, not just in order or with the song.

Kate has also figured out that letters make words, and she's started trying to figure out what the words say, which she does purely by guessing from the context. It's awfully cute. Like the time she was looking at the cover of The Land Before Time and read, "T-I-M-E. That spells dinosaurs!" Of course she's got a long way to go before she's actually reading, but she's very interested in letters and words and books, which we think is great fun.

Kate talks in her sleep sometimes. Often something like, "I want to hold it!" which she says a lot when she's awake. The other night I saw her smile to herself in her sleep and murmur, "W-X-Y-Z!" Maybe she was dreaming about painting letters on the porch.

Duck on my head

We've been watching some of the music videos on noggin.com with Kate. There's one called "Pig on Her Head" that has a catchy tune and quite adaptable, if somewhat unlikely, lyrics. We've been playing around with it a bit, like the time Doug was carrying a box of books on his head and started singing "My dad has a box on his head."

So today, we were sitting in church and Kate was playing with the little bean-bag animals that Rebecca brings in her bag. There's a monkey, a koala, a rat, and a duck. It helps to keep Kate occupied, to have toys that she only sees on Sundays. She stood up on the pew next to me and started bouncing the duck on my head and singing "My mom has a duck on her head." Ha! This child is just too clever sometimes. I think that's the first time I've heard her put her own words in a song.

What's the magic word?

"Toast!"
"Can you say please?"
"Toast!"
"Say 'Toast please!'"
"Okay!"
"You say it. 'Toast please!'"
"Okay!"
"Say 'Toast please!'"
"Okay!"
*sigh*

Kate-speak 101

We have unraveled the principles of Kate's pronunciation. To start with, G's and K's turn into D's and T's. That part was easy enough to figure out. But also, for words that start with an S followed by another consonant, she puts the S at the end. That one took quite a bit longer to decipher. She does it very consistently, though, so we eventually caught on. Hence, snap, snail, and star become naps, nails, and dars, respectively. Squirrel is dirls, and squish is diss. She and Doug play a squishing game on the bed. It's just too cute to hear her yelling "Diss! Diss!" and shrieking with laughter.

Kate has known the word "turtle" for some time, but recently added "tortoise." One of her books has a tortoise in it. I told her that a tortoise is like a turtle. Now whenever we read that book she points to it and says, "Tortoise! Tortoise like a turtle." One of our neighbors even has a little tortoise in a terrarium, so Kate got to see a real tortoise. That was pretty exciting. She has also learned that a toad is like a frog. Another neighbor has a bird bath with a little stone toad on it, and Kate will go over and pat the toad and say "Toad like a frog!" When watching the Veggie Tales song about Barbara Manatee (from the library) I told her that a manatee is like a whale, which she accepted easily enough, but then Doug suggested that perhaps a manatee is more like a seal or a walrus, so we'll have to see if we can correct that.

Kate has been finding animals in her food. The other day she held up a bit of cheese from the pizza we were eating, and informed us that it was a seahorse. Tonight her bits of naan bread contained a hippo, a whale, a wolf, and a horse. This seems like pretty advanced abstraction for a two-and-a-half year old, but Doug told me that she had some bug-shaped graham crackers in the nursery at church that made quite an impression on her, so maybe that's where she got the idea.

"If you like to waltz with potatoes..."

After I posted about Kate singing wordlessly to herself, we were having dinner and she was sitting in her highchair playing with her applesauce, and we heard her sing, "He's a tramp... I looooove him!" (Guess what she'd just been watching?) We were much amazed and amused. And last night she was singing part of the Primary song (from church) that goes, "Hello! (Hello) Hello! (Hello) we welcome you today." It's so fun. I've heard her sing recognizable snatches of the alphabet song, but it's just neat to hear her putting things together with words.

All of us at NDISB have been working hard at getting the store put back together. They weren't able to restore anything from their older backup, which means they lost their entire customer database. Very sad. But we're determined to bring it back better than ever.



I just finished up this Potato Prints set. I did the potato stamping back in January, and then got distracted with other things. It was fun. And messy. I had potatoes and paint piled up on the kitchen table for days. I also painted a cantaloupe and rolled it on the paper. (And then we ate it!)

I also got Baby Blue-Eyes up in the store, and the creative team ladies have been doing wonderful things with it. Here's a layout by Karen and one by Audrey.

Our little reader

Kate has loved books for a long time. She's always coming up to me with a book and saying "Read this! Read this!" (It was a great day when we got her to stop dropping them on our faces in bed.) She's interested in the words. When we read Hop on Pop she always wants to read the lists of rhyming words on the end papers. Several times, even. A few weeks ago she started pointing to the words herself and saying "fast past last, it bit, upside down." Sometimes she even gets fairly close to the right words that she's "reading." (We've done it so many times she's memorized where they are.)



We've had Mo Willems' stirring The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog out of the library before. It is currently visiting our home again, along with the adorable Knuffle Bunny. Kate loves both of these books. The last time we had the pigeon book, she was intrigued by the page where the pigeon loses it and yells "THAT'S IT!" Perhaps it's the big letters. Or the pigeon's crazed expression. Or the way that Mom yells "That's it!" when she's reading it. Kate would point to the letters when we got to that page. This time she's reading it with us.



We made an audio file yesterday. Kate's squalling a bit at the beginning, because she wanted to play with the microphone, but she still says "That's it!" right on cue.

Click here to hear Kate

And just for fun, we'll throw in some animal sounds too.

Out of the mouths of Babes

Kate has learned to say "Baa Ram Ewe!" That's from the movie Babe. We've been watching it a lot lately. Kate has been increasing her vocabulary, and trying to copy the things we say more. Sometimes she even gets the context right. The other day I said to Doug, "I'm tired of being sick." Doug said, "Me too!" and Kate said "Me too!" We just had to laugh.

We've been functioning below normal pretty much all week. (Halloween was a bust, as well.) Kate's feeling a lot better, but now Doug's got it pretty bad. I went to church just to teach my Primary class today and discovered that I had no class. I guess everybody's sick.

Here's a recent picture of Kate, just for fun.

"More!"

I went to a baby sign class back in January, and I'd been sort of inconsistently trying to do a few signs with Kate. Then when she started copying my "The crocodile goes snap! snap!" when reading one of her little board books, I figured she would be able to learn some. We've been doing "more" and "milk," and I think she's got "change" figured out too.

Today we all went down to Olympia so Doug could drop off a job application at South Puget Sound Community College. After a brief visit to campus we went to a couple of parks. While I was taking pictures of some crocuses (ah, Spring!) Kate was having fun stomping on metal plates in the ground. One of them was a little bit loose, and Doug was jiggling it with his foot. Kate complained when he stopped. He said, "You want some more?" and she signed "more!" (She doesn't do it quite right, but we know what she means!)