Yahoo! has a good post covering some of the topics to consider while posting about your kid. Useful stuff - cause you can’t be too paranoid.

The boy likes feeding dogs their treats.  No matter what size the dog, he likes feeding them their treats.  The only dogs we let him do this with are dogs we know very well.  Still, he’s careful with his fingers and finds it pretty exciting.

This weekend, he was feeding my father’s dogs their cookies.  The dogs are a bit taller than him, and much heavier, and still quite young and excitable. There is a lot of action going on.  But the boy still wants to do it.  He even makes sure to feed each of the dogs.  Feeding just one isn’t acceptable - he wants to make sure they both get a treat from him.  To the point that he’ll deny one dog a treat, which is a little risky given their relative sizes.  But things worked out okay.

Right - the language part.  We’ve taught him “all done” as both a sign and now he says it as well. But it’s something that has always been conveyed by him about his feeding time (he’s all done) or by us, about something he wants (watermelon’s all done!)

Though, over the weekend, with these dogs running around him wanting more treats, and in the center of their tornado, he was in the middle shouting “cookies all done” and making his sign for “all done” as well.  It was nice to seem him shift his point of view for the phrase…though, the dogs didn’t really get the message.

Sal’s had this Elmo and Friends Look and Find book for a while. He picked it up again this morning to read so we sat down. And we talked about the book for probably 5 minutes, before even opening it up. The cover is just that interesting.

I helped me realize how good these “look and find” books are. There are just a lot of things going on on every page - that there are endless conversations one can have about the page. And that’s the beauty of the book. Sometimes I’ve found it difficult to strike up a conversation with Sal, as I don’t feel as comfortable with the one way communication.  Though this book has enough things going on in it that it is really easy for me to feel comfortable talking to him about the pages.  Let’s look at the juggling bugs or the dinosaur floaty and how that can help when swimming or let’s count the ladybugs on the page.

It also is crazy to see how perceptive he is. There is a parade page and many things are going on. There is a lady with a fruit hat - that has bananas in it. So we’ve talked about her crazy banana hat in the past. But one day, when I was asking him where the banana was, he found a guy on the street watching the parade, eating a banana. Turns out there’s a bunch of bananas on the page - and discovering them is part of the joy of re-reading this book over and over again.

Counting. Colors. Animals. Activities. All covered in this book - and it has been a fun process watching Sal develop different interests as we’ve been reading the book. Today, he pointed out that me and Grover both wear glasses and we talked a bit about that.

But even better, I’m looking forward to what comes up next time we read the book…or, since Amazon’s having a buy 3 get 1 free sale - we’re getting more look and find books. Cars, Finding Nemo (I’m figuring that will have lots of sea animals in it - which should be a kick) and well, Batman seems a little too early for the guy, but there’s a Dora look and find as well as a Disney friends one. Though he hasn’t seen the movies Cars or Finding Nemo, we figure the books will be interesting enough on their own.

Bet he will think so too.

Tags: parenting,, child, development

We discovered a month and a half ago that Sal could count on his own. Sal’s aunt told us - telling Sal he had to count to 5 before she’d help him jump off the little ledge area. We then found out from Sal’s nanny that he’s been counting for longer. It never occurred to us to ask Sal to count on his own. One of those moments where you really feel out of it as a parent. She had recorded Sal counting to 10 for her kids since it was cute to hear Sal alternately whisper and shout the different numbers.
In any case - counting has been an interesting adventure. It looks like it will be an ongoing process. Besides sesame street - we began counting w/ Sal when we discovered his love of playing hide and seek (and cheating while playing hide and seek… but that’s a different story). We’d have Sal cover his eyes, then have him repeat the numbers. He loved playing hide and seek over and over even though we probably only have about 6 hiding places that we’d hide in. Counting was really just a rote set of words he could string together.
Since then Sal’s taken to counting things - but he’s been starting to leave out numbers. The five was the first to go - then 6. Sometimes he even skips the 4. Seven, eight, nine and ten are strong finishers for him. His one to one correspondence is solid to 3, and sometimes higher, sometimes not. We’re trying to re-introduce 5 by having him count to 5 if he wants to do little fly-jumps while holding his hands. He’s stubborn though about not wanting to include the 5… We’ve read it’s pretty common in kids to start omitting numbers. He does like to count things and finish it with a hearty “ah ah ah!” a la the count from sesame street.
Number recognition was not something we were that into introducing to Sal but we found out a couple months ago that Sal could recognize the numbers. Looking at his dad’s t-shirt he read off the “K2″. It’s funny how much Sal loves looking at his dad’s t-shirts, and even his own clothing. Made me even think that it’d be a good little business selling mom and dad shirts with things that their kids will enjoy to look at and later read. When Sal was a baby - he loved a shirt that had a Yahoo! smiley on it. Simple - but very compelling to his little baby mind. We found out later that the nanny does little number games with him - like helping her put together the letter/number kitchen mat, allowing him to hit the microwave buttons if he pushes the right numbers, using the little golf kit and asking him to pull out particular holes from the bag that we stored the kit from. Something else I’ve recently discovered is that Sal enjoys it when I take the big foam numbers and letters and have them talk to him on what they are - like grabbing the A and making it dance in front of him - and saying “I’m the A! I say “AHHHH!” and having it run away. He’ll copy these little games as well.

We’re trying to slow play his number knowledge - bringing it up when he seems interested, stopping when he’s lost interest, figuring out what motivates him like games like hide and seek and having him count off before we fly him up in the air. He seems to learn things on his own terms - and we think that’s the way it should be. He’s surprised us up to now with what he’s picked up by this - no reason to stop this now.