Developmental update: Age 3.5, Part 1.
Oct. 3rd, 2008 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaIt's been a while since I did a developmental update, and suddenly Alex is three and a half. This got long, so I'm splitting it into two parts.
Verbal/Cognitive Development
We are in the full flowering of the preschool question phase. Why do houses have roofs? Why do people wear shoes? What if cats didn't have any bodies? What would happen if we went straight through a red light? What would happen if a tarantula tried to bite a black widow spider? (That one is my favorite.) Why do some signs say "no parking?" What is the law? How old will the Niblet be when I'm big enough to be in the play at SUUSI? When were you nine years old? These questions rarely seem to arise from anything in particular. I remember a store clerk, or someone, who overheard a long series of questions about relative ages, finally asking in a whisper, "Why does she CARE?" We don't ask that question - that way lies madness. We just answer to the extent that we can.
She likes to be informative, especially if it involves planning ahead for hypotheticals. My all-time favorite example: "Dad, if you were a girl, and you were as big as Mama, and you had a baby growing in your uterus, then you couldn't drink wine." Sometimes she has information we didn't realize we needed to know: "If we had a pet barracuda, we would feed it a big bowl of snapper." When she's learned something new, especially if it's a hard-to-integrate piece of information, she explains it to us again and again: "Sometimes, when the police come, and they need to talk to someone, there could be a fight. The man in the orange shirt could want to fight with the police. So your dad takes you away from there."
She also makes up facts and relates them with authority. The other morning, we were talking about the fact that egg-laying animals' babies don't grow in a uterus - they grow inside the egg, outside the mother's body. "Yes," Alex said, "and the egg gets bigger and bigger because the baby is getting bigger and bigger." I explained that, actually, the baby starts out very small inside the egg and grows and grows until it takes up all the space in the egg - the egg itself doesn't grow when it's outside the body. "I saw an egg get bigger and bigger," Alex told me severely. "I saw it at the zoo. Last week I saw it. It started out very small, and got bigger and bigger until the baby came out, and it was a bird."
I had initially thought that she might be reading by this age. Michael and I both read very early, and when she was two Alex seemed to be heading in that direction - paying a lot of attention to the text in her books, asking me to "show the words" when I read, et cetera. But then we started reading more complicated books with richer plots and a lot more text in smaller print, and she stopped trying to follow the words along. Sometimes we wonder if she can read, a little - although it may just be the wonders of the preliterate memory. If she can, she doesn't seem to be aware of it. And we're certainly not in a hurry to teach her. I'm pretty confident that, barring an unidentified learning disability, if we keep reading and reading and reading to her she will ultimately make the jump to reading on her own.
She's starting to be more interested in numbers. She can figure out some simple addition and subtraction problems, and often asks questions about how much various numbers add up to. Her understanding is still pretty basic, obviously - although she surprised me the other day by reeling off 10-1=9 and then 10-2=8. ("What if you had ten fingers and you lost one? You'd have nine. And what if you had ten fingers and you lost two? You'd have eight.") She can definitely manage some basic computations as part of everyday life - for example, I remember her looking at a tray of sushi and telling me, "Mom, you have four of those. So if you give me one, you'll still have three." (That was back before she started demanding an equal share of the sushi.) She found out that this is called "math," and now frequently asks "let's play math." We're thinking of picking up some Cuisinaire rods for her to play with.
Her block play is very geometric these days. She doesn't build many open structures - she likes to make thick walls or solid blocks, where all the pieces line up exactly, four quarter-blocks corresponding with one unit block, et cetera. If I build an open structure, she fills in the gaps precisely, fitting the extra pieces in like a puzzle. I'm not sure where this comes from, but it's clearly quite important to her. It seems like mathematical thinking.
She continues to be fascinated by all things scientific. Her intense obsession with Magic School Bus books has mercifully dropped off, and now we just have to read them to her a couple of times a week rather than several times a day. We've gone through the library's entire picture book collection of books about insects, and are working our way through several of the Let's Read and Find Out Science series. Popular topics include insects, insects, insects, dinosaurs, space, and the human body, with occasional excursions into earth science and various non-insect animals. She's got an excellent ability to differentiate insects from other arthropods (count the legs, count the body segments), and is pretty good at mammals vs. non-mammals - for example, she'll sometimes ask me, "Does [animal name] lay eggs, or does it nurse its babies? ...Oh yeah, because it doesn't have fur or hair."
She has strange ideas which are just plain fun. The other day she was playing with a drinking straw. She inserted it into the crack between the doors of the built-in china cabinet, put her mouth to it, and informed us, "Now I can breathe the air from in there." Ohhhhh-kaaaaay. She was particularly excited to inform us that we could breathe air from the higher cabinet shelves.
Physical Development
Alex is doing a lot of jumping and climbing and running, these days. She seems to lag a little bit behind her peers with her large-motor development: a little slower, a little clumsier, mastering things like jumping later. Not in the sense that she's actually delayed, on a clinical level, but she's a bit behind the rest. From watching her on the playground, I think that in part it's because she is more cautious. She doesn't want to fling herself off the climbing structure, or whatever. I think she's also happier with quiet play than a lot of her peers, so she may just get less practice at the large-motor stuff. Of course, it's also possible that she just hasn't managed to inherit Michael's and my fabulous athletic skills.
Her small-motor coordination is pretty good. After long periods of obstructive "assistance," she has become a genuine help in the kitchen. While I'm making dinner, she can peel garlic, shell shrimp, use a peeler to pare carrots and cucumbers, and even - with caution - grate cheese. She's working on her egg-cracking and pea-destringing skills. She can stir a bowl of brownie batter without spilling it all over the counter. She can write her name, shakily, and can make a few other letters as well. When she draws, she is capable of drawing a figure and will occasionally do so, but she'd rather scribble, loop, and experiment with colors. One small-motor thing she really can't do is manage a computer mouse, or a Wii remote. I know lots of kids who are younger than she is who manage a mouse with ease, but Alex just doesn't seem to have the hand-screen coordination. We haven't really encouraged her to develop the aptitude, I guess, but it's still something I notice.
We haven't worked as much as we should have on physical self-care skills. She can handle her own clothes in the bathroom, but she is just now learning how to take off a shirt. We haven't done anything with buttons or zippers. She can unzip a sleeper or unbutton my shirts, but I don't think she could start a jacket zipper. She can put on her own sandals, at least. We haven't tried her on putting on sneakers. I don't have any reason to believe that she couldn't learn to do these things, but we haven't made it an issue - and we need to.
After being a very tall toddler, Alex has dropped back closer to average height. This is about what you'd expect from the child of me and Michael - the mystery is not that she isn't staying tall, it's that she was ever tall in the first place. Her weight is starting to catch up - at her last appointment, she had reached the 30th percentile for weight, and the 7th percentile for BMI. She looks more filled-out and healthy, although you can still see her ribs and her knobbly knees stick out. I am much less worried about her appetite these days, in part because I have seen her eat twelve - twelve! - pieces of nigiri sushi at a sitting.
She sleeps pretty well. Perhaps once or twice a week she will wake up in the middle of the night, usually after a nightmare, and need attention. She talks and sometimes laughs in her sleep. Going to sleep at night can be a prolonged process - we're working on getting her through the process independently. It's fine with me if she wants to lie in bed looking at books and playing with her stuffed animals for an hour after bedtime, but it's not fine with me if she calls me every five minutes. I'd guess that she gets about 11 hours of sleep a night, or maybe a little less. She almost always sleeps until after 7am, which is nice.
Verbal/Cognitive Development
We are in the full flowering of the preschool question phase. Why do houses have roofs? Why do people wear shoes? What if cats didn't have any bodies? What would happen if we went straight through a red light? What would happen if a tarantula tried to bite a black widow spider? (That one is my favorite.) Why do some signs say "no parking?" What is the law? How old will the Niblet be when I'm big enough to be in the play at SUUSI? When were you nine years old? These questions rarely seem to arise from anything in particular. I remember a store clerk, or someone, who overheard a long series of questions about relative ages, finally asking in a whisper, "Why does she CARE?" We don't ask that question - that way lies madness. We just answer to the extent that we can.
She likes to be informative, especially if it involves planning ahead for hypotheticals. My all-time favorite example: "Dad, if you were a girl, and you were as big as Mama, and you had a baby growing in your uterus, then you couldn't drink wine." Sometimes she has information we didn't realize we needed to know: "If we had a pet barracuda, we would feed it a big bowl of snapper." When she's learned something new, especially if it's a hard-to-integrate piece of information, she explains it to us again and again: "Sometimes, when the police come, and they need to talk to someone, there could be a fight. The man in the orange shirt could want to fight with the police. So your dad takes you away from there."
She also makes up facts and relates them with authority. The other morning, we were talking about the fact that egg-laying animals' babies don't grow in a uterus - they grow inside the egg, outside the mother's body. "Yes," Alex said, "and the egg gets bigger and bigger because the baby is getting bigger and bigger." I explained that, actually, the baby starts out very small inside the egg and grows and grows until it takes up all the space in the egg - the egg itself doesn't grow when it's outside the body. "I saw an egg get bigger and bigger," Alex told me severely. "I saw it at the zoo. Last week I saw it. It started out very small, and got bigger and bigger until the baby came out, and it was a bird."
I had initially thought that she might be reading by this age. Michael and I both read very early, and when she was two Alex seemed to be heading in that direction - paying a lot of attention to the text in her books, asking me to "show the words" when I read, et cetera. But then we started reading more complicated books with richer plots and a lot more text in smaller print, and she stopped trying to follow the words along. Sometimes we wonder if she can read, a little - although it may just be the wonders of the preliterate memory. If she can, she doesn't seem to be aware of it. And we're certainly not in a hurry to teach her. I'm pretty confident that, barring an unidentified learning disability, if we keep reading and reading and reading to her she will ultimately make the jump to reading on her own.
She's starting to be more interested in numbers. She can figure out some simple addition and subtraction problems, and often asks questions about how much various numbers add up to. Her understanding is still pretty basic, obviously - although she surprised me the other day by reeling off 10-1=9 and then 10-2=8. ("What if you had ten fingers and you lost one? You'd have nine. And what if you had ten fingers and you lost two? You'd have eight.") She can definitely manage some basic computations as part of everyday life - for example, I remember her looking at a tray of sushi and telling me, "Mom, you have four of those. So if you give me one, you'll still have three." (That was back before she started demanding an equal share of the sushi.) She found out that this is called "math," and now frequently asks "let's play math." We're thinking of picking up some Cuisinaire rods for her to play with.
Her block play is very geometric these days. She doesn't build many open structures - she likes to make thick walls or solid blocks, where all the pieces line up exactly, four quarter-blocks corresponding with one unit block, et cetera. If I build an open structure, she fills in the gaps precisely, fitting the extra pieces in like a puzzle. I'm not sure where this comes from, but it's clearly quite important to her. It seems like mathematical thinking.
She continues to be fascinated by all things scientific. Her intense obsession with Magic School Bus books has mercifully dropped off, and now we just have to read them to her a couple of times a week rather than several times a day. We've gone through the library's entire picture book collection of books about insects, and are working our way through several of the Let's Read and Find Out Science series. Popular topics include insects, insects, insects, dinosaurs, space, and the human body, with occasional excursions into earth science and various non-insect animals. She's got an excellent ability to differentiate insects from other arthropods (count the legs, count the body segments), and is pretty good at mammals vs. non-mammals - for example, she'll sometimes ask me, "Does [animal name] lay eggs, or does it nurse its babies? ...Oh yeah, because it doesn't have fur or hair."
She has strange ideas which are just plain fun. The other day she was playing with a drinking straw. She inserted it into the crack between the doors of the built-in china cabinet, put her mouth to it, and informed us, "Now I can breathe the air from in there." Ohhhhh-kaaaaay. She was particularly excited to inform us that we could breathe air from the higher cabinet shelves.
Physical Development
Alex is doing a lot of jumping and climbing and running, these days. She seems to lag a little bit behind her peers with her large-motor development: a little slower, a little clumsier, mastering things like jumping later. Not in the sense that she's actually delayed, on a clinical level, but she's a bit behind the rest. From watching her on the playground, I think that in part it's because she is more cautious. She doesn't want to fling herself off the climbing structure, or whatever. I think she's also happier with quiet play than a lot of her peers, so she may just get less practice at the large-motor stuff. Of course, it's also possible that she just hasn't managed to inherit Michael's and my fabulous athletic skills.
Her small-motor coordination is pretty good. After long periods of obstructive "assistance," she has become a genuine help in the kitchen. While I'm making dinner, she can peel garlic, shell shrimp, use a peeler to pare carrots and cucumbers, and even - with caution - grate cheese. She's working on her egg-cracking and pea-destringing skills. She can stir a bowl of brownie batter without spilling it all over the counter. She can write her name, shakily, and can make a few other letters as well. When she draws, she is capable of drawing a figure and will occasionally do so, but she'd rather scribble, loop, and experiment with colors. One small-motor thing she really can't do is manage a computer mouse, or a Wii remote. I know lots of kids who are younger than she is who manage a mouse with ease, but Alex just doesn't seem to have the hand-screen coordination. We haven't really encouraged her to develop the aptitude, I guess, but it's still something I notice.
We haven't worked as much as we should have on physical self-care skills. She can handle her own clothes in the bathroom, but she is just now learning how to take off a shirt. We haven't done anything with buttons or zippers. She can unzip a sleeper or unbutton my shirts, but I don't think she could start a jacket zipper. She can put on her own sandals, at least. We haven't tried her on putting on sneakers. I don't have any reason to believe that she couldn't learn to do these things, but we haven't made it an issue - and we need to.
After being a very tall toddler, Alex has dropped back closer to average height. This is about what you'd expect from the child of me and Michael - the mystery is not that she isn't staying tall, it's that she was ever tall in the first place. Her weight is starting to catch up - at her last appointment, she had reached the 30th percentile for weight, and the 7th percentile for BMI. She looks more filled-out and healthy, although you can still see her ribs and her knobbly knees stick out. I am much less worried about her appetite these days, in part because I have seen her eat twelve - twelve! - pieces of nigiri sushi at a sitting.
She sleeps pretty well. Perhaps once or twice a week she will wake up in the middle of the night, usually after a nightmare, and need attention. She talks and sometimes laughs in her sleep. Going to sleep at night can be a prolonged process - we're working on getting her through the process independently. It's fine with me if she wants to lie in bed looking at books and playing with her stuffed animals for an hour after bedtime, but it's not fine with me if she calls me every five minutes. I'd guess that she gets about 11 hours of sleep a night, or maybe a little less. She almost always sleeps until after 7am, which is nice.
