15 December 2010

Reading scriptures at night, Nut Brown asked us what 'behold' means. We told him that 'behold' means 'look'. Now whenever anyone reads 'behold', Nut Brown interrupts to say, "Behold means look!" Last night he'd gone out to get a drink when I ran across a 'behold' in the verse. I said it loudly, hoping he'd hear it and shout back from the kitchen, but instead Mr. Brown and Rose Pink chorused in unison, "Behold means look!"

21 May 2010

Today I called in sick. We were going to have pancakes for breakfast, but were out of milk, so we were going to run to the store just to buy milk, and on the way out the door Mr. Brown collected all the things we had to be mailed at the post office and also our rebate check so we could open a bank account...so we went out for breakfast and then ran errands.

We got chocolate donut holes for the kids, five each. Nut Brown said he was still hungry afterward, and Mr. Brown wanted another muffin, so he and Nut Brown went back to the counter. Nut Brown selected a chocolate donut. Are you sure? Mr. Brown asked. Oh yes, Nut Brown insisted. I've never had a chocolate donut before!

We stopped at the bank in the grocery store to open a cash account. While we were waiting for some paperwork to print, Rose Pink started a game with Nut Brown. You stand over there, she directed, and sing the song. It goes like this:

I looked out the window and what did I see...

A great big zombie coming after me!

And then I'll chase you!

They took turns being the zombie.

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Tonight, reading scriptures, Rose Pink read, "...saying that he was a... Mormon..."

Mr. Brown corrected her, "Close but not quite, it says monster." I objected. I think there's a fair amount of difference between Mormons and monsters!

An email from Mr. Brown this morning about Rose Pink: We worked with the Preprimer words and managed to get her to stop rolling her eyes by not expecting her to sound out and just to ask what the word is. Then we took the words she didn't know (only 10 out of the 40) and made sentences out of them to make a bit of a story.

Can you help me find my little blue kitten?

I do not know where she is

She ran away

She is playing a funny game

Here she is

Italics added to show HF words worked on.

It was satisfying.

Nut Brown's best new trick: jumping off the stairs from the fourth stair up.

Rose Pink's best new trick: reading a verse from the scriptures with us every evening. Mr. Brown has been working on sight words with her so she reads straight through all the short words, recognizes words like Nephites and Lord, and does her best to sound out long words like "contention" and "remainder". It is hard work for her (her concentration wavers sometimes) but often when she finishes one verse she asks to read another one.

19 October 2009

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.

sunday afternoon

Nut Brown is sleeping upstairs, and Rose Pink is playing some princess story with the barbies. She asked Mr. Brown to get a tight sleeve on a barbie, and he suggested cutting the lacy, delicate, finger-grabbing sleeve off entirely. Rose Pink was very pleased with the idea and has brought me three more dresses to cut sleeves off of, and one pair of tights that she suggested we make into leggings. She also suggested cutting their hair, but I negatived that one.

A new little girl named Makayla (sp?) has moved into our complex. She is five and she and Rose Pink took to each other immediately and have been inseparable since. Mr. Brown and I also approve- we find her nice and well-mannered and she really seems to enjoy playing with Rose Pink. Yesterday she was over for dinner (she didn't want to stop playing and go home) and when Rose Pink had to go do her chore of putting away the silverware Makayla asked if she could help. I was impressed. Her parents are also pretty relaxed about her, too, which has made it very easy for Rose Pink to make friends. I am so glad that Rose Pink has another friend. The only downer about the whole thing is that Makayla is a child of divorced parents so she's only here some of the time.

Nut Brown has been producing more and more words. He's in that delightful parrot stage where he repeats every word you say like a little echo. It is so, so fun. As his vocabulary has expanded we've started to hear more adjective+noun phrases: big truck, red truck, etc. and requests, like drink please. ('Drink' is pronounced 'gonk'. Only his parents know what he means.) Today he negotiated with us for the first time- I told him, time for your nap, Nut Brown, and he said, "ONE BOOK! ONE BOOK!" So we read one book and he went to bed. He 'reads' a verse every night by repeating each word after the speaker.

The other night he and I were out playing by ourselves and he suddenly says, "Sssss!" and made monster hands. I said, Oh, are you a lion? and Nut Brown said, "Nake! Sssss!" He was pretending to be a snake. He has a very vivid imagination, like his sister. But he imagines different things.

He has also completely, utterly fallen in love with books. An empty lap is an invitation to trot over with a book and say, "read!" It's the first thing he does in the morning (even before breakfast) and the last thing he does at night. He's not interested in stories as much as he is in identifying and naming objects. I love reading to him.

And when he comes downstairs from his nap or from his night's sleep, he smiles and says, "Hello!" He also says "Hello!" to me when I get home from work, and to Mr. Brown when he comes up from the basement. He is still small enough that when I pick him up under the armpits I can feel his heart beating under my fingertips, and that feels so intimate.

Rose Pink is learning to read and reads from Dick and Jane to us. I am amazed at how well she does reading and remembering words. At night when we read scriptures, she reads all the words that she knows (and, the, if, is) and repeats after us the ones she doesn't. Mr. Brown is looking for a list of common words for her to memorize.

Nut Brown just got up from his nap ("Hello!") which means that Rose Pink has been playing barbies by herself for almost two hours.

7 July 2009

Nut Brown has started to self-identify when his name is used. So when Rose Pink prays, "Please bless Mommy and Daddy and Nut Brown...", he pipes up and says, "Mak!" and points to himself. When we're planning an outing, he's learned how to be included. I'll say, "Let's go to the park. Daddy and Rose Pink..." and Nut Brown will shout, "And me! And me!"

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Yesterday Rose Pink read us the first thirty pages of Dick & Jane. Really reading, what Spencer calls 'whole word recognition'. She'd look at the page and say, "See Jane. See...no, Look, look, look..." as she recognized that 'look' was not 'see'.