"I have CDs at home"

What he said:



"Mommy, I have CDs at home."



What me meant:



I found your secret stash of CDs and DVDs and I scattered them all over the living room. You'll be picking them up for hours! Good luck with that!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sick

For the second time in his life, Timothy threw up tonight.

I've had less than 45 minutes sleep and I'm exhausted...but since he's finally asleep again after waking up at 11:30 I figured it's time to change the sheets.

I guess he caught what his cousin has...they played together and his cousin got sick on Friday.

There goes my day!

My views about TV

I don't like the idea of a child sitting in front of a television all day. I'd rather Timothy be staring out the window or watching ants or playing blocks (or basically anything) rather than watching tv.

With that being said, Timothy loves the children's show Caillou. It's slow and it's tedious and boring to me, but Timothy loves it. We have some recorded programs that he watches.

I've read a lot of studies that argue watching tv as a toddler will hurt the child's language development. The studies say a child doesn't learn language from the television--he needs to hear it from a human speaker.

I hate to say it, but that's simply not true. Timothy watches (some) tv and he has a very large vocabulary. Yesterday, Timothy called Parent's Day Out "playschool" (which is what that call it on Caillou). None of us have ever used that word...the only time he's ever heard it was on the television show.

So it must at least be possible for children to learn new vocabulary words from the television.

And I think about it this way--children are much more capable of learning new things than adults. If I learn new vocabulary words from the television (which I often do), why couldn't a young child?

Obviously, you've got to talk to your child--incessantly--for your child to be able to develop a good vocabulary. But I think all the time I've spent worrying that our daily Caillou or Little Einsteins will somehow "suck the language" out of Timothy has been for nothing. Children will learn regardless of the circumstances.

Chinese

Today we went to the Childrens Museum--we are so lucky to have one less than half an hour away!!

Timothy had a great time learning about birds, and they served sweet potato pie as the snack for story time. He really interacted with the other children there today more than ever.

There was a little boy (who was absolutely adorable) named Lulu there. Lulu's mom kept speaking to him in another language, but I didn't know what language they were speaking. Finally, I asked - they were speaking Mandarin Chinese!

Once I told Timothy that Lu Lu was from China, Timothy said Ni hao!!

Then, at dinner, Timothy insisted that he needed to eat with chopsticks. We asked him, "Are you Western or Chinese?" Timothy smiled held up his chopsticks. "Chinese!"

Nobody tell him otherwise, okay?

Kids Say the Darndest Things

Here are some Timothy-isms heard in the last week.

As we were driving, I said I was going to call my mom. I asked Timothy, "Do you know who my mommy is?" Timothy thought about it and then answered "Your mommy is....daddy".

.....

Timothy hung his magnetic train upside down from our nightstand lamp. I teased him, calling it a silly train. Timothy looked at me and shook his head. "It's a chrysalis"

....

Timothy has pajamas with bugs all over them. He laughed and giggled when I put them on last week, and I said "Look at all the bugs!!" Timothy corrected me: "They're insects"

....

The My Father's World curriculum calls for Timothy to learn the songs Old McDonald's farm, Bingo, and the B-I-B-L-E. We already sing the last one, so I thought I'd sing Old McDonalds farm at school time. Timothy got upset. As I sang "EIEIO" he got upset "Not that: B-I-B-L-E!!"

....

We were going for a long-ish drive, so I put some goldfish crackers in Timothy's carseat pocket. As I went to put the second scoop in, Timothy held out his hand to stop me and said "That's adequate"

....

Timothy brought David's violin to him the other day and insisted that he play. When David finally got his instrument out, rosin on his bow, etc, he told Timothy he was ready to play. Timothy went to the hall and said "I'm leaving" shutting the door behind him.

Math (Dots)

We followed Glenn Doman's guidelines regarding the math program, almost to the letter. We did numerals through dots (1-100) and used them to teach multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. We taught square roots. Timothy most certainly learned - he could pick 47 or 92 out of a pile, and he could answer questions immediately that I had to use a calculator to double-check.

He was never able to VERBALIZE the answer, though. I can ask him "What's 10 plus 24?" and he'll just make something up, like 2.

Plus, he's not showing much interest in math dots. He just doesn't want to do the dots. He likes to count and he likes to play with patterning cubes and he likes to do a balance, but he just doesn't care about the dot cards.

What bothers us, a bit, is that he can verbalize all of the other things he's learned. We can ask him "Who was the second president - Adams or Washington?" and hold up pictures and he'll both say the right answer and touch the right answer. Bits and reading he can remember and verbally recall, but not so much with math.

As we start our new curriculum next month, we're trying to figure out what to do with dots. MFW (My Father's World) teaches counting and numerals to 100, but we'd still like to reinforce the dots (especially since I don't think a child could just forget something he learned that quickly). Perhaps Timothy is just not interested but he still knows it.

So we're going to ease up on the math program a bit and just focus on one number a day and then corresponding equations with that number. One thing I'm really going to work on is the verbalization - "today we're talking about 23. Say twenty-three!!"

If it works, then that's good. If it doesn't work, it seems like he's still good at traditional two-year-old math (he can do patterning, he can count to 20, he understands greater than and less than) and no harm was done.

This is the first time we've been a bit frustrated with Doman, though. I've read of so many parents who do the full math program and their child excels and then just suddenly "loses" the math ability...how does that happen? Why does that happen? It seems like they really need to do more research in this area.

I am 100% convinced that at 11 months old Timothy knew the answer to 24+54-21, but now he acts like he doesn't. I don't know if he's not interested or if he's going through a phase or if he legitimately doesn't know.

"Flying" to China

We've been going to the Children's Museum more often lately because gas is less expensive ($1.79 today).

One of Timothy's favorite activities there is, most certainly, the airplane. He loves to get in and make me get in and he'll pretend to fly. I always ask him where we're going, but he never seemed to fully understand the question until recently. "China" he answered back. I acted excited. "But we'll have to speak Chinese," I told him. Timothy flew the airplane, seeming to ignore me, until we "landed" and he jumped out. "Ni hao," he told the air as he ran off to a new activity.

Two-year-olds are too much fun!!

Finale of Our Trip

So the story ends with Sea World. Timothy woke up in a crabby mood and was scared by the enormous playground. All he wanted to do--all day--was play in a sandbox.

He was sorta good for the shows, but he didn't love them. In fact, when Shamu splashed him unexpectedly, he looked at me with venom in his eyes and said "I hate Shamu."

He fell asleep during the dolphin show (around 2pm) and when he woke up, he was in a much beter mood. In fact, he went to the aquariums and said "Hello, mammals! Hi dolphins!!" He even wanted a stuff Shamu at the gift shop, and he hugged it and said "I love you, mammal." What a 180 degree turn-around!

I think he might be a bit too young for Sea World yet. We liked the zoo much better!

Our Trip, Continued

We stayed in a hotel with a playground and several pools, just so Timothy would have something to do when we were hanging around the room.

We got a kitchenette suite, and it was a very reasonable price ($65/night). When we woke up that first morning, Timothy was in a great mood and he ran to go get his trains. As he ran past the tile by the bathroom, he did the traditional banana-split fall - his legs went up and his head went down--hard--on the tile floor. Apparently, the bathroom toilet had overflowed during the night or something and created a giant puddle on the floor.

As I called to tell them to get maintenance out asap, they asked me what that loud crying noise was. I told them I was holding my son because he slipped on the tile.

They were so nice and moved us to a 2-bedroom condo (see pics above). This room was SO nice and SO wonderful. Jimmy had his own bedroom and we had a giant jacuzzi tub, a full-size kitchen, and HDTVs.

Timothy wasn't seriously hurt-kids are tougher than you might think.

Cameron Park Zoo

We had a great vacation!!

On the way down, we stretched our legs at the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, Texas. It was absolutely positively fabulous!!

We stayed for two hours, and in that whole time we only saw one other zoo-goer there (an old man driving an electronic wheelchair). We basically had the entire zoo to ourselves. And the zoo was magnificent!!

They had this awesome new Brazos River Country exhibit that makes the zoo twice the size that it used to be. Plus, they had so many "extra" creative little things, like a children's playground, a slide that runs through the aquarium, caves to crawl through. And we all agreed that their aquarium was better than Sea World.

We paid $21 to get in, but we ended up paying $39 more to get a membership. Get this--a membership allows us to get into the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, TX an unlimited number of times for a year--AS WELL AS the Dallas Zoo and Dallas Aquarium--free, for all four of us, for one year! If we would have bought a membership from the Dallas Zoo to get in free, it would have been significantly more. So, we were really excited about that. (We also get in to 100's of zoos across the country for free).

So, basically, we had an awesome time at the zoo. It was like we were the only people in the whole world (even though we weren't) and we just let Timothy walk and walk and walk and he loved it. For me, that was my favorite part of the trip. The zoo is about three hours from our home and I'd love to drive back one weekday just for that.

Timothy "Reading" a Book

Okay, he's not really reading, but he is enjoying a book and that's the whole point.

POOP

I'm not going to get too detailed about the pediatric gastroenterologist--let's just say that my kid is literally "full of it" and the doctor is increasing his medication to 4x the amount he's on right now. He apparently had a painful BM once and is now withholding because he's afraid it will hurt. Because of this, he has impacted stool.

Gross, yes--but nothing serious.

Caterpillar

Timothy's been VERY, VERY interested in caterpillars lately.

We've had a couple of fuzzy ones (sorry, don't know the names) crawling across our sidewalk, and Timothy and I just sat and watched one for 15 minutes while Jimmy skateboarded down the sidewalk. The end of our adventure came when Jimmy jumped off his skateboard and happened to land right on little caterpillar. Timothy tried to say "Caterpillar--get up" to no avail.

Yesterday, I was on the computer trying to get some dissertation written and Timothy walked up and asked to see a caterpillar. I guess he's figured out that you can use the computer to see whatever you want.

I went to YouTube and we watched a couple videos of caterpillar metamorphosis. He LOVED it.

Today, I asked him if he remembered what we watched yesterday on the computer, and he remembered that we watched "Caterpillar in chrysalis." I then asked what comes out of the chrysalis and he said "Butterfly."

It's really awesome that he's taking an interest in things on his own, and we love to just follow his lead and show him as much of the world as he wants to see. And I love that he has such a great memory!!