Boo!

For Halloween Owen and I dressed up as scary monsters, you betcha!


(That's Elmo and Sarah Palin in case you can't tell...)

Happy Halloween!

What he's not doing

I've recently realized that I tend to focus here on the bloglet on things that Owen does that we find interesting or striking in some way. But especially after my last post about how he's learning his letters, I don't want you to get the wrong idea. There are plenty of ways in which he's not so terribly advanced. We got a questionnaire to fill out for his daycare, to give them an indication of whether there are any developmental areas (communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, or personal-social) that he might need to work on. And he's doing just fine. But each category has a list of questions and it's funny - sometimes really funny - how difficult some of the skills are for him, compared to others.

For example, for fine motor skills, they ask whether he can stack a small block on top of another, a skill which he mastered about 6 months ago and quit doing once he got to towers of seven blocks, again, months ago. But then in that same category, they ask "Does your child get a spoon into his mouth right side up so that the food usually doesn't spill?" Now, I love him dearly, but are you kidding me? Where do I start? How about a fork. Let's start with a fork. Can he get food onto a fork? No. If I put it onto a fork for him, does he put it in his mouth? No. If I put it into his mouth, can he get it off the fork with his lips, tongue, or teeth? Sometimes. Does it then go in his mouth? No. OK. So, a spoon? For dry food, a spoon is only more difficult, because of the gravity problem. For foods like yogurt, a spoon would be better, but if you give him one, he just dangles the spoon in it, dipping it in and out. It doesn't help that he doesn't much like yogurt. But I'm not about to test him on soup!

Problem solving. "Does your child drop several small toys into a container, such as a bowl or box?" Yes. He can also use a shape sorting toy to put nine different shapes in a box through their own holes. He can name most of the shapes as he does it. So, great, right? 100% for problem solving? Not so fast. "After a Cheerio is dropped into a small, clear bottle, does your child turn the bottle upside down to dump out the Cheerio? (Do not show him how.)" Yeah, sure he'll do that, right? Nope. We tried. He got his hand stuck in the bottle. So we got a smaller bottle. He got his hand even more stuck. We closed off part of the opening. He couldn't fit his hand inside. He cried.