Leaps and Bounds

This post has been a long time coming and, truthfully, writing it is more of a record for me than anything.

Jack is over 19 months now and, at 17 months, we were worried about his lack of talking.  He hadn't said much of anything other than the occasional "pop" and "mama".  Then all of a sudden at 18 months his vocabulary exploded.  It's like he knew all the words (which, logically, I knew) but he decided it was time to show mom and dad what he could do before they threw him in speech therapy. Amazingly, he almost immediately, in probably the span of a week, went from saying one letter to all 26.  Actually, strike that...25.  He still can't say W but he can say the rest of them.  He points them out in street signs, he spells out every letter on the cover of books, and he loves writing them in chalk on the ground.  And he's working on being able to sign the whole alphabet.  The middle is still a little muddled but he's working on it...

The nerd alphabet kid also loves his numbers.  He's got 1 through 10 down pat and just today he seemed to have 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 down too.  

More than anything I'm just amazing at how much he LOVES books.  Like I am not exaggerating when I saw we spend hours every day reading books.  And he doesn't flip the pages impatiently or get bored.  He sits still ("couch!" "sit!") and watches and listens intently as I read a book.  The books are getting way longer with a lot more text.  It's also amazing that he's starting to learn how to spell some words...or at least sight words.  Like zoo, farm, pets, moo, etc.  So cool.  Lately, if it's a book he knows really well, he'll point out every single thing on the page...each animal, each tree, each flower.  I almost fell out of my chair last week when we picked up his baby color book and he proceeded to "read" it to me by telling me each color on the page and what the colored object was.  ("blue fish", "orange flower", "purple snail")

He definitely has some opinions when it comes to books.  He'll make me go through an entire pile, pushing the ones he doesn't want out of the way until I get to the one I want.  And the other morning at 6am he kept crying "buh-ee, buh-ee!" and I couldn't figure out what he wanted.  I went through the enormous stack of books in our family room but wasn't successful.  Finally I was like, "Bunny?" "Yes."  "You want the book Bobby Bunny?" "No."  "You want the book Runaway Bunny?" "Yes."  So I went and retrieved it from his room.  Crazy stubborn child.

So, what can I say, he's a reading nerd.  Not surprising considering how many books I devoured as a child.  And, just because he knows his alphabet and letters better than the other kids his age, I am by no means calling him a genius.  He's good at that stuff and the other kids are good at other stuff.  Things he can't do at all yet.  Blow bubbles, eat really well with a spoon without making a gigantic mess, be super social and say hello using kids' names.  Clearly everyone has their strength and Jack's is more academic and less social.  Yay for passing down your personality to your children!

And for posterity's sake, a few more things that he can do at 19 months:

- get excited and tell me if the stop light is red or green or orange (oops...damn kid, I thought you were smart.)
- command the automatic store doors to "open!" or "close!"
- notify me when we are driving up a hill - "up!!" or "down!"
- started understanding plurals and now will add an S to some things "two Ds", "three snakes"
- is pretty good about saying please when he is asking me for something.  still working on thank you.  

And let's end with another ABC video because he's so darn cute when he's trying to sing.