Summer II has begun for me and Charlotte and we are settling into a routine. Life is good. She enjoys being outside either in the backyard or at different green spots we jog to with Pancho along the Mississippi. But her favorite thing still is looking at books, which I'm sure makes her Suze very proud.
Wait I forgot. Eating. Her favorite thing is eating. And taking a long to time to eat. She'll eat for 20 minutes or so and then say "all done." But really this initial "all done" just serves as a statement that she plans on being done eating sometime in the next five to 15 minutes. She loves everything about food, even the shopping and cooking. For an easygoing child, Charlotte gets really upset if I'm cooking and she can't watch. So I either hold her while I cook or have her sit in a chair in the kitchen.
And no matter what when she sees food, no matter in what state it is, ingredients, trash, pictures.... she'll say, "mmm good." Really Charlotte? Onions frying in oil after only ten seconds deserves the "mmmm good" label. Cripes, how about a little critical thinking?
Like I said, cooking and eating aside, her favorite thing is books. Lately she has become very particular about what she wants to read. Her favorite books right now are Mother Goose books, especially a Richard Scarry Mother Goose I got for her at Wild Rumpus (I never knew he made a Mother Goose book until I found it there). But she is also fond of the Mother Goose editions her aunt (my sister Sarah) got her. Part of our morning routine is to sit in her room and read together; I read my book and she reads hers. Just last week she started asking me to read her books to her instead. Usually that is something she only likes at bedtime. So it's a pretty nice time. And it's really cool because she is now often picking the book we read at bedtime the night before.
At work I use this website called Tarheel Reader for the students I work with who are emerging readers/writers or non-verbal. I also use it with the autistic kids to get them to ask questions of each other and me and process the answers. Anyway, here is one of many stories I wrote with the kids this year:
http://tarheelreader.org/2012/01/13/favorite-things-2/
These were two of my lower-level autistic students so they didn't get to the point to even do a project like this until April, when Charlotte was first getting into Richard Scarry's Mother Goose book. Read it for page 13 only. Jonah, one of the kids in the story, would come up to me the rest of the schoolyear and say, "Read Richard Scarry to your daughter" and then start quoting passages from What Do People Do All Day? It was pretty awesome. I miss a lot of my students but am enjoying the break.
In terms of other skills, her fine motor is as solid as ever and her language is chugging along. Two word phrases are commonplace and I love getting insight into her lexicon. Like "table" means "I want to sit in a seat and do an activity," be it sitting at the table to eat or read or sit in her stroller to look at flowers. She also loves to scoot around the block in a foot scooter Emily got at Savers. If you ever want to know the #1 reason why Charlotte doesn't walk, carve out 45 to 60 minutes in a day to take her around the block in her scooter and you'll see why. The question "hey what is this in my hand?" is so much more interesting to her then "hey what's over there?" If they did a toddler play about Christopher Columbus, the role of the person who spent twenty years at her table whittling a block of wood into a BEAUTIFUL steering wheel for the Santa Maria's would be played by Charlotte Nawrocki.
So i takes forever because she stops every thirty seconds to focus on each yard, house, blade of grass, sound.... She best appreciate being an only child with a daddy who is no hurry because most kids don't get the chance to take this long to go around a block and comment on each sound, say to every tree, and watch other people.
Kind of an interesting language aside: she uses the word "owl" to mean, well, an owl, but it also means every animal decal she can see from her changing table. And "doggie" is still the catch-all phrase for four-legged animals but she will also name some of them by specific name. She might even say, "doggie cow" when she sees a cow. So I think she is getting semantic categories. I never knew toddlers at this age can already express categories and use words in double-meanings as starkly and competently as Charlotte is. Like I wrote in an earlier post, my surprise largely because I worked with toddlers who were on the other side of the language spectrum. Charlotte's personal lexicon does lead for funny moments like when she saw a picture of a cat in a barn scene and pointed to it, assuming it was a cow and said, "Doggie moo." Try again, my dear.
Gross motor is coming. She'll be walking by the end of the summer and probably as soon as mid-July. She takes one or two steps a day but never out of purpose of moving from A to B; she's doing it more to experiment. Well, until today. We were at music class this morning and she took four whopping steps across the room. It was the first class of the summer and we are going at a new time (summer hours for me!) so I didn't know anyone. So when Charlotte took four full steps (and this time it WAS just for the purposes of locomotion), of course no one cared because they had no idea how big of a deal it was. It was also the end of class so all the parents were busy getting their kids ready to go. But I saw it and was so privately excited and wanted to clap and cheer but no one cared, including Charlotte. This is partly because she took a decent spill after the fourth step and was too busy brushing off the fall to notice the gravity of the moment (pun fully intended). But it was exciting for me and really somewhat bizarre to just sit there and quietly watch it happen. Regardless, she is getting bolder and bolder with her gross motor each day.
So it's been a nice start to the summer. If I get my act together maybe I'll take some pictures of it.
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