Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Easter Egg hunt

We're spending my Spring Break with my parents. On Easter after church Tobin hunted for eggs in the front yard. We'll post more pictures and stuff later, but I thought you might enjoy seeing him search.


Monday, April 13, 2009

A Shy in your room

This is the kind of stream-of-consciousness songwriting we're treated to in our house. Oh, and watch your armpits.


Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Sign here, please

Tobin is very interested in reading and letters. For the last few months, we've gotten used to him saying things like "S-T-O-P. What that says?" when he sees a stop sign. Or "T-A-R-G-E-T. That say 'Target,'" when we visit the store. He almost always remembers how to spell "Mama." "Daddy" always starts with a D and ends with a Y, but it isn't so consistent. He gets "dog" confused with "go" pretty regularly. Overall, he has been inconsistent enough with his letters and spelling that I was on the fence whether he was really recognizing characters, putting them together, and "reading."

Then he blew me away. We were sitting at the table Sunday. I was working with a manila folder when I decided to show him letters. I wrote the usual "Mama, Daddy, Hannah, Tobin" on the sheet and asked him to identify the letters of each and say the words. Flying colors. Got it. But I can't say for sure he wasn't parroting from memory. I wasn't sure if what I was seeing was real decoding-comprehension-process "reading." Then he said "I want to draw your hand." I figured the letter activity was over, so I let him trace my hand with the red pen I'd been writing with. After he finished tracing mine, we flipped the folder over and I traced his hand two or three times. Apparently, while he was in Florida last week, his grandpa stressed to him the importance of adding fingernails to the hand-tracings. I drew fingernails on each of the outlines of his hands. All of this was very normal.

Then T said "I want to write my name." We've let him "sign" cards and notes for a while and always encourage him to write his name. Again, all normal. Until I saw what he wrote. 43 days shy of his third birthday, he wrote this on the paper: 



I was speechless. I think I cheered a little too loudly when he finished because Tobin gave me a look like "I write my name all the time; what's the big deal?"