Some neat and/or cute things Tristan is doing lately: saying “p-apple” for pineapple, taking an interest in the word “people” and what people actually ARE, showing he actually understands phonics for real, and taking on counting all ninjalike. Oh, and when he tries to initiate conversation or complain, he says “A B C D!”

Tristan’s been using the Lakeshore fruit cutting kit in therapy sessions and is able to say the names of most of the fruits and vegetables in the kit. I love it that he tries very hard to say them, especially since he’s randomly balky about talking with me and/or in general. He’s really cute when he says “peeeeeeeeeeeee-APPLE!” and he persists because he knows we think it’s cute (he’s tried to say it correctly, but then jubilantly says it his way and we all smile..). Maybe we will have a produce lesson when he’s slightly older, with samples to chomp on if he becomes curious.

He learned the word “people” and thusfar recognizes at least stick figures (drawn by me, because I cannot draw friggin’ people), male/female restroom glyph style icons (in an iPad app called Magnetic Alphabet), and Little People figurines as being “people.” For the first time, he was interested in playing with the massive collection of Little People toys that I’ve been amassing for him since his first birthday. He did not remove the people from the vehicles immediately, although he did throw them all one by one (thankfully just from his chest to the floor) for a few minutes. We lined them up and counted them – it turns out that we have sixteen figurines currently present. Some of them are cats and puppies, too, and we identified those. However, cats and puppies still count as people.. at least he might grow up with a kind attitude toward animals.

Tristan has been randomly reciting the alphabet in phonetic form: aaah, buh, cuh, duh, eh, et cetera. He started that about two days ago. I knew he was getting good with the phonics, but that’s the first real proof that he has that shit memorized.

So that makes:
– visual recognition of upper and lowercase letters
– fairly to very clear verbal identification of all of them although he balks at W and is still sloppy on G and J
– memorization of the sequence of letters
– memorization of at least the most common phonetics for each letter
– not too shabby at singing the alphabet song, although his tune is more competent than his enunciation of letters while singing
– shows a far better understanding of spoken words when paired with written representation, and remembers the written representation if he learns the word

Oh, he’s kind of bored with letters. Numbers are actually what he spends his time on lately. He indicates that there are “extra” people by counting them. He counts things often and randomly. He’s shown that he can count properly to 12 in his therapy sessions (with one-to-one correspondence, or one number per object and not getting messed up along the line and counting too fast/slow). He recognizes numbers.. wow, I’m not even sure to what extent. We’re used to him identifying 20 and below verbally. I wrote out the numbers from 1 to 90 on a big sheet of paper (would’ve gone to 100, but I ran out of room) and showed him how counting by 10s works to determine what comes next in the sequence (40 after 39, for instance – 30 and 40 are lined up on the paper, so it makes logical sense to Tristan). He’s been enunciating his numbers more recognizably – I think the current sounds are “uh, two, eee, fuh, five, six, seh, eight, nah, ten, ev-en, telve, tir-TEEN, fuhteen, fifteen, sixteen, seh-teen, eighteen, nah-teen, tunty.” Anyway, I wrote out the words for some of the numbers separately from the giant table o’ numbers, in this format:
9 nine
19 nineteen
90 ninety
and he made the distinction in pronunciation. I’m not sure he’s memorized them yet, but he certainly made sense out of the process. It’s easy to tell because he will not try to talk if he does not, and he most definitely talks about his numbers. It makes me melt to hear my little baby say the number 90 in his little toddler voice.

What a wonderful update! Which is good because other than these neat achievements, his behavior has made him quite the pain in the ass lately. Right now, in fact, it’s 5am and I believe James is in Tristan’s room calming him down because he woke up screaming *again*. Tristan’s been really clinging to me and overstimulated to the point of obnoxiousness by my presence. He’s been reluctant to entertain himself or spend much time hanging out in his own room with plenty of toys. He’s been reluctant to spend time across the living room from me, watching videos tailored to his interest and snacking on spicy chips. I must change my tune on two year olds: they ARE easier, but they’re giant pains in the ass. They become little teenagers, in essence.