Daley Ponderings

6/1 - Noah's use of /f/ in everyday speech has increased immensely and he now uses it in a substitution.  3 = "free"

6/1 - Jonathan cut Faith's bangs "because she asked me to."  Forgot that part about asking Mom or Dad...  He actually did a good straight job of it, so I didn't feel the need to fix it.

6/2 - Faith now says apple with two syllables, "ap-uh"

6/3 - Noah, laughing, "When I first saw Joshua's umbilical cord, I thought it was a raisin in his bellybutton!"

6/3 - Faith tries to copy her brothers in jumping around the house.  She does a little toe lift on one foot while taking the other off the ground, and includes helpful arm movements as well.  She says, "ubp, ubp" to mean jump, jump.

Faith sings a lot, sweet little tunes.  She also says thank you ("ayd-yoo") most times when someone gives her something or does something for her.

6/3 - I had a conversation with Jonathan about skin color and was struck by his innocence and seemingly natural ability to notice people as people without thinking of skin color.  This conversation started with a question he asked as he read Compassion International's magazine, "Is those kids' skin black because they got sunburned?"  I think this was the first time he had paid attention to skin color. I had already noticed that when he said, "that black man" he meant a man wearing a black shirt, just as he would say "that purple woman" to mean a woman with a purple dress on.  One of the striking things to me after this converstion was when he was describing to me a character in a movie, he said, "You know that black man... I mean, that black suit man, not a black skin man..."  Another striking thing was his comment (after I had used as an example our two sets of renters to show that skin color has nothing to do with behavior or character) that he had not even noticed that our current tenant and her family are African-American.

6/4 - We finally turned Faith's carseat to a forward facing position.  Her legs were starting to be scrunched, though she is still a few pounds short of the max weight for rear facing.  She seems to enjoy it.

6/6 - Faith is saying more two and three word phrases now, including "what 'at?" and "here [you] go".  Also on this day, she said, "buht" = book, "ep-uh" = ketchup, "aye" = fries.

6/7 - When playing with our interactive Wheels on the Bus book, Faith said "ou, ou, ou" = round, round, round.  She also said "ow" = cow later that day.

6/8 - Faith: "ower" = flower

6/9 - Faith: "ty-dih" = tiger; "bamp" = pants.

Noah is also using the /s/ sound in conversation.  This is a sound that we have only casually worked with him on, and not one we had "officially" done in school.  It is still very like /sh/ or lisping, but I know he has time to fix it.  I always need to remember that a period of seeming little progress is followed by an explosion.  I had been wondering if he'd ever put /f/ and /v/ into conversation, and here he is, using /f/ and /s/ (and sometimes /v/ but not as often.)  So now in school we're working on /l/ and he's doing great!  The only thing is he has to work very hard not to substitute /w/ as is his habit.   One of the words on our /l/ sheet is balloon, and though I'll be happy when he says it correctly, I will miss "bab-yoon" (: