Situational Awareness

Dear Ian,

It feels like it's been forever since I made an entry in your little baby-book-blog, so it feels good to be back.  And now that I think of it, I should probably start calling this your big-boy-book-blog.  Lots of "B's" there...

In the past few weeks you have been a busy dude; you've been learning, doing and saying a lot!  It always amazes me how much you learn and absorb in a day, and even more amazing is the fact that you are retaining and repeating stuff.  For example, we have been working on learning colors.  Not really seriously, of course.  It goes against mommy's pedagogy and teaching style to make you "sit and learn," so we learn by playing and by talking, but that's another post entirely.  So, by playing with lacing beads, singing the traffic light song and various art projects, you have been learning your colors.  You can correctly identify red, yellow, purple and blue.  For green, you simply say "GO!"  Thanks, traffic light song.

Anyhoo...  You are now pointing at items and naming their color, and that has been really neat.  You, me and your Daddy were driving down the road the other day, and when we were stopped at a stop light, all of a sudden from the back seat you started freaking out and saying "reh!" (your pronunciation of red) and then making this funny blowing noise.  Over and over you'd say, "reh, bfffp, reh, bfffp!"  I could not, for the life of me, figure out what you were trying to say.  And then you started pointing.  After looking around for a couple of seconds, while you got more and more irritated that we weren't comprehending, we finally figured it out.  You were pointing at a Red Elephant restaurant billboard.  So funny!  You see, although you know your colors and you understand and say SO much, you refuse to call animals by their names.  For example, instead of calling a dog a dog, you call it a "ruff ruff."  Similarly, a cow is a "moo," an alligator is a"chomp chomp," a duck is a "quack quack," and so on and so forth.   I have no idea why you are boycotting the actual animal names.


Every day you are learning and doing something new.  I mean, I knew this would be going on about now; I used to teach kids in your age group, but it's so neat to see MY baby bear doing this stuff.  Makes me one proud Mama.  'Course you always do that!

Love you bunches!
Mommy