Mr. Brown has developed the charming habit of falling ill on Thursdays so that I have to stay home from work on Fridays. Two weeks in a row-- I'm crossing my fingers that he'll be sick again this Friday. He and I have been busy planting bulbs to get ready for next spring. I went a little crazy buying them, so he planted sixty crocuses, and I have planted six hyacinth, six pink irises, five narcissi, twenty snowdrops and about sixty daffodils. I started with a hundred daffodils so I still have forty to go but I've run out of places to put them. I'm thinking maybe I'll take them back and put them around the roots of the trees back by Mr. Stump but I haven't been brave enough yet. It's supposed to be in the sixties for the next couple days (a bit of a warmup after the frosts we've had) so hopefully I can get them planted SOMEWHERE.
Mr. Brown and I went out during naptime to plant, and Rose Pink was playing by herself with her barbies. We said,
We'll be down in the garden if you need us, and she said, Okay. The garden is within shouting distance. I went back once to check on her. She was in the middle of some drama with the barbies and when I interrupted her to ask if things were okay, she gave me a completely disoriented look- who are you? Why are you talking to me? I love the way she talks to herself while she's telling stories. She still talks to herself in the morning when she wakes up, too.
Reading with my children is a surprisingly verbal activity right now. Nut Brown wants to repeat every word you say, so it's impossible to read to him while he's eating dinner, because he stops eating in order to talk. (Why was I reading while eating dinner? Because I was trying to entice him to stay at the table and eat. He stayed, all right, but he didn't eat because he wanted to talk.) Rose Pink is learning to read, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this, but learning new words and practicing new sounds together involves lots of verbal repetition. She reads through a sentence, we go over and sound out the words she doesn't know, and then she reads it over several times and repeats the tricky words over and over out loud. We don't prompt her to do this, she just does, and I have to remind myself that
repetition is the mother of learning and not interrupt her while she's cementing things in. She is really getting the hang of sounding things out- I've caught her doing it without prompting a couple of times. And now I get frustrated with English- she reads "One cow" and pronounces it "oh-nee cow" or tries for "people" and gets "pe-uh-plea". Oh well, it's all part of learning, I suppose. I can't change the language, so I'll just have to correct her apologetically.
Some neighbors that I grew up with sent us some questions cards for 2-3 yr olds that we have been reading with Nut Brown. They're full of questions and pictures and are meant to be conversations starters for you to use with your two-year-old. Nut Brown loves to sit and go through them with us- we ask him questions, look at colors, count the puppies, talk about fish and shopping and so on. It is a really, really great tool that helps us discuss a variety of topics with him. Last night he and I were going through a few of them, and we came to a card about the zoo. I asked him if he liked the zoo and he looked up at me and said, "Yes!" and then he said, "Monkeys!" Do you see monkeys at the zoo? I ask. "Yes!" says Nut Brown. "Lions!" and it went on like this, with him naming things that he remembered seeing at the zoo- train, elephants, giraffes...it was really amazing because it really felt like I was having an actual conversation with him, discussing what he'd seen at the zoo- a place that he remembered being. So wonderful! It was just totally amazing to feel so engaged with him, talking about something abstract like what we did two weeks ago.
He calls elephants "bumps" and generally refers to a horse as a 'nay' and a cat as a 'mow' (rhymes with cow).
At supper last night when I was through reading to Nut Brown, Rose Pink decided that she was going to read to him. We had been looking at Richard Scarry's Word Book (thank you, Grandpa!!) and she kept turning pages and naming items, and he sat beside her and repeated them. She would say, Nut Brown! Feather! and he'd repeat, feather, and she'd move on to the next word. It was so sweet to watch them together- the good part of a bossy older sister, mothering her little brother. They both had a great time.
I like hostas well enough, but I like them usually in combination with other more colorful things. So I announced my intention to dig them up, and replant them along the side of our house in a strip of dirt there. (In the photo above, you can see the crater where I successfully (with Mr. Brown's help) uprooted one of the monsters. He got planted farther back in the yard by a tree.)
Rose Pink wanted to help. With no supervision or assistance from me she dug up a smaller hosta, broke it into four pieces, and replanted them in the dirt strip. And then she watered them. And then she told me she'd done it.
She is amazing.
