Santa Pictures

This year:


Last year:


Two years ago:

If a picture is worth 1,000 words...: September - December 2010

I am so over-scheduled and under-rested, (especially with regards to trying to earn a little money here and there) that personal computer time has suffered. I hope to start writing about natural living and natural mothering again, if only to document for myself what I've learned along the way (should I ever find myself needing to learn it again). But for now, my goal is to keep an up-to-date monthly journal of my little one's transition from baby to boy.

In order to catch up with three months, here is a picture journal of some of my little boy's current antics. He loves:

Dressing up, especially in high heels!




Putting the key in the ignition and turning the car on!


Commandeering every skateboard and bike he sees on the road or in the park!


Learning to count in Thai while jumping on fabric swatches!


Taking good care of his monkey!


Posing for cheese!

A former linguistic major, I am most fascinated by the opportunity to watch a little one learn a language from scratch. It's like my own research subject up close and personal.

• Regarding phonetics and phonology, the fricatives (sounds like f, v, th, s, z, sh, zh) were the hardest for him to get. All fricatives became /h/. One day, he started saying them at the end of words, and he usually does that just fine. But even now, he rarely can say them at the beginning of a word.
  
• Regarding syntax, he started out copying me like a parrot and so used "me" or "I" for "you", and "you" for "me" or "I". (Interestingly, he never confused his subjects and objects, as I've been told many other babies do.) I decided not to correct him, and sure enough he eventually figured it out on his own! One day last month, almost literally overnight, he switched the words to their proper usage, and now uses the words "I", "me", and "you" appropriately, and also began venturing into the world of "we" and "us".
• On another syntactic note, he typically misplaces negative words. I don't know if this is normal, or if he is confusing English word-placement with Spanish word-placement. But I am excited to watch his little brain figure it out!
  

...A video is worth 10,000: September - November 2010

More amazing feats!

Once my little boy got most of the car symbols memorized, he started showing an interest in letters. One day, I spent about 30 seconds pointing out some capital letters on a book cover. The next day, I picked a different book and did the same for about 60 seconds. The third day, he was reading them to me! He knows all the capital letters and about half the lower case letters, and can tell you the sounds associated with quite a few of them.

At 2 years and 4 months:





My little boy always wants to know which country everyone is from, and even talks about it in his sleep. Check it out!

My Baby's A Genius: August 2010 - Part 1

"He should be on the Jay Leno show!" someone told us in the zoo parking lot. A couple weeks later, a bike rider who almost hit a car because she was gawking in surprise at my baby. I know every mother thinks her child is a genius, and I'm no different. I'll explain at the bottom of the post why these two people were shocked, but for now let's recap our month...

In cute news, last month my baby gave business cards away to everyone as they walked out of the office. This month, everyone gets a hand shake, usually one with the left hand and another with the right.

Out of the blue at least a couple times a day, my baby says "Kountani Gambo from Baku, Ghana." Oddly, he has never met this fascinating person - she is the mother of one of our clients and he picked up her particulars from one of our conversations. He can also tell you from which different country many of our African clients are from. Funny he doesn't seem interested in the origin of any of our non-African clients.

A friend gave us her son's trike, and we must take it with us everywhere we go. It sleeps in our bedroom or the hallway at night, it goes with us to the park, and it rides in the backseat of the car each time we drive somewhere.


Another cute outfit he picked on his own:


Fun with Uncle Seth, who was visiting from Las Vegas!



Definitely progressing in true boy fashion, my baby is just short of obsessed with any motor-run contraption. Here, getting a ride on one of his favorite "toys" at the pawn shop:


Any time we see a motorcycle or moped, he identifies which it is and then proceeds to run through the list of things a driver must do before driving away:

My Baby's A Genius: August 2010 - Part 2

And on to this month's amazing skills (at 25-26 months old), which were each a surprise to me as they came...

Reading 0, 1, and 10.

In response to the question "What shape is this?" he can identify and say circle, square, trapezoid, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, oval, parallelogram, diamond, heart, and sometimes rectangle. He seems to have a little trouble with triangle.

Counting from 1 to 10 in Spanish (well, I got the camera turned on at 3), then from 1 to 10 in Mandarin Chinese:


Counting from 1 to 10 in French (I got the camera turned on by 2 this time):


Singing his ABCs (click to view at Photobucket):


And the skill that amazes people wherever we go:


Last weekend, we were walking down a street and he was excitedly calling out cars as they drove by at 35 miles an hour!

His current repertoire includes 15 cars. Do you know each of these?