rivka

I meant to do a developmental update in January; Alex is actually more like three years, ten months right now. But I realized that if I don't post one now I may not have another chance for quite a while. So here goes.

Cognition: We just had parent-teacher conferences at nursery school, and Alex's teacher emphasized how aware Alex is of what's going on around her. I think she put her finger on what I find most striking about Alex right now: she's incredibly observant. She notices things and remembers things, and puts them together in ways we don't necessarily expect. Like the unusual chameleon, for instance. Some examples from the last week or two:

"Dad says I'm heavy, but if I were on the moon, I would be light."

"If houses are made of brick, how come the walls inside are different colors instead of being brick?"

"Books don't have commercials."

"There aren't any grownups in Charlie Brown. So Charlie Brown and Sally can't be a family - a family has grownups and kids."

"What will happen if my body forgets my chicken pox shot?"

One of the downsides to her awareness is that it seems to breed fears. She frequently wants us to run through security information: "Are all the doors locked? Are all the windows locked? ...Did you put a bar across the chimney?" Or she'll run through scary hypothetical "What would happen if..." scenarios, sometimes genuinely upsetting herself. Generic reassurance doesn't satisfy her.

She's more and more interested in math. On our way out to dinner Wednesday she sat in the back seat chanting, "Four and four and one and one make ten. And four and four and two make ten. And five and five make ten. And five and four and one make ten." She can count to one hundred - and higher, with a little support; she asked me to help her count all the flags on the map of the world and did a fine job of it. She is fascinated by comparative ages. She loves to ask questions about how old the Niblet and Michael and I will be when she is a given age. Sometimes this is associated with privileges ("How old will the Niblet be when I'm old enough to sit in the front seat? ...So he'll still be in a car booster"), but sometimes it just seems to be for the joy of the numbers, in the same way that she'll sometimes ask me to add up doubling series for her.

In another recent car conversation, she asked me if zero was a number. Yes, I said, zero is a very important number. "Why is zero an important number?" "Well, if you have a one all by itself, that's one. What happens if you have a one and then a zero?" "Ten!" And how about a one and two zeroes?" "One hundred!" "That's right. And a one and three zeroes is one thousand." She thought that was pretty neat. I couldn't bring myself to further explain place value to a three-year-old - although we got into it a little when she said that I was older than Michael, because 35 is a bigger number than 42. (Counting our ages a couple of times cleared that one up.)

We've just ordered her a set of Cuisenaire rods, which I think she'll enjoy.

Reading: We think she must be reading a little, but she maintains that she can't read words. When I've tried to have her sound out CVC words, she genuinely doesn't seem able to do it. And yet she picked out a flag on the world map and announced that it was the flag of "Berzil." I don't know how she did that if she didn't read it. And today, in a maze book we haven't looked at in months, she opened to a random unfinished page and asked me "Am I supposed to get Larry Lobster to the hook, or the octopus to the hook?" "How did you know his name was Larry Lobster?" I asked, looking at the caption. "Dad told me," she insisted. (No he didn't. At least, not any time in 2009, he didn't.)

Whatever. I don't have a stake in being able to say that my kid read before age four. I'm curious about her process, because she doesn't seem to be able to use phonics skills to sound out words even though she knows all the letter sounds. But for the most part we're happy to just keep reading to her, and expressing our confidence that she'll be able to read in the future. (I have also casually let her know that even when she can read, Michael and I will still read to her. Just in case that's holding her back.)

She can write all the letters, I think. She likes to have me tell her how to write words, and she's written long things like "Merry Christmas" on the whiteboard in my office. On smaller pieces of paper, she hasn't mastered the idea that print marches from left to right. She'll put the letters wherever they fit, and doesn't realize that this changes what she's written.

Her drawings sometimes include reasonably elaborate figures, and sometimes are just scribbling. She doesn't seem to differentiate.

She's got good fine-motor skills, for the most part. She can string small beads, do a lacing card, use a pencil, tie a simple overhand knot. Interestingly, she's not able to use a computer mouse very well, or a Wii remote at all. I get the impression that other kids her age have largely mastered those things. We don't give her a whole lot of opportunity, though. When she plays her computer games, she sits on my lap and I do the mousing.

Play: Her current obsessions are Baby Jesus, Christmas carols, board and card games, and imaginative play. We're reading fewer books these days. Bedtime is always reliable for reading, but we sometimes go a couple of days without reading books at other times. (A weird feeling for us.) Games, on the other hand, are huge. Candyland, Hi Ho Cherry-O, Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Memory, her two Blue's Clues computer games... she loves them all.

She spends long periods of time on independent imaginative play with her collection of small animal and human figurines. These are always mixed together, so that the pirates have taken up residence in the castle and Baby Jesus from her ceramic creche attends school in the Fisher-Price Schoolhouse, accompanied by a set of animal friends including not just the canonical donkey and lamb but also a camel, a tiger, a blue-footed booby, a frigate bird, and so on. She talks out loud when she does this kind of play, and gets annoyed if you respond or ask her to repeat something. ("Don't answer me, I'm just playing!")

She loves any kind of art project. Twisting pipe cleaners together, gluing and taping things, coloring with markers and crayons, painting, cutting, stickering, gluing, taping, more gluing, more taping. Sometimes these projects actually look like something, but more often it's just about the process. Tonight she decorated her chair "for Valentine's day" with a sort of a mixed-media sculpture technique, in which a magnetic letter, a Hi Ho Cherry-O cherry, a homemade magic wand, and a tiny box containing more plastic cherries were all fastened to the chair with tape.

Social/Emotional Skills: At school, Alex apparently has plenty of friends and plays well with all the kids. She plays well with the kids in her RE class too. I think I probably see the worst side of her social skills, because the kids we get together with most often at home are the children of my two closest mom friends, and it doesn't seem like there's the greatest of personality matches between them. Around these kids, Alex sometimes has a tendency to play the victim, bursting into noisy sobs and complaining that they are mean if her personal space is slightly impinged upon, having trouble sharing, policing their behavior, etc. I am trying to find a balance between encouraging her to express her feelings and stand up for herself, and encouraging her to toughen up a little and not be such a drama queen. What I should really be doing, probably, is setting up more playdates with kids she plays with well. She has one set of friends - boy/girl twins - where we can have a four-hour playdate in which I can mostly just relax and chat with the mom, because the kids mesh so incredibly well.

She is often very sensitive to her friends' individual situations. She'll quiz me about the ingredients of various foods, matching them up to her friends' allergies: "So if Edward came over, we [could/couldn't] give some to him." When we were Christmas shopping, she wanted to buy toy cars for Nick, who is obsessed with cars, and Disney Princess stuff for Isabelle, the most Disney Princessy girl who ever lived. (She's got a less-clear handle on what her father and I like; she keeps wanting to buy us toys she would like to play with herself.)

We're starting to see some unpleasant, but I think developmentally typical, social stuff. When she was two, her classmates parroted "you're not my friend" at each other, but it was divorced from any emotional content for the deliverer or receiver. In the three- and four-year-old class, they say it and it hurts. And they remember it, and resent it. The word "hate" has entered Alex's vocabulary. She has also recently picked up the words "dumb" and "stupid," which she says in a particularly ugly new voice - mocking and snide - which Michael and I can't stand. I have started maintaining that I can't understand her when she uses the ugly voice. When she says "dumb" or "stupid" we ask her what it means, and - when she responds, as she always does, that she doesn't know - caution her against using words she doesn't understand. "Hate" gets rephrased. ("Oh, you're angry at Allie. What happened?" "You don't care for peas.")

Also on the unpleasant side of things: she has a tendency, age-appropriate but incredibly annoying, to get silly and wild and defiant and to escalate those behaviors when we try to rein her in. Most of the time when she does stuff that makes me lose my temper she is giggling, not upset or angry. The only thing we've found to be even semi-effective is withdrawing our attention. So if we're trying to get her into pajamas and start the bedtime routine, and she's running away and kicking and giggling and making tripods of herself on the bed and not cooperating with undressing, we'll just leave and go into our own room, asking her to call us when she's ready to get changed. Eventually she calms down when her audience is gone.

She's very conscious of herself as a big kid now. She's fully capable of taking herself to the bathroom, although she'll often request company because she is "scared" or "lonely" going upstairs alone. (She also likes to have one of us wipe her so that she doesn't have to wash her hands. *eyeroll*) She refuses to be buckled into her booster seat at the table. She has negotiated a deal in which, the day Colin is born, she will stop using a booster at the table entirely because then she'll be a BIG sister. She usually refuses to let me wash her in the bath. We still mostly dress her just because it's quicker, although she can put many clothes on by herself and can even do up large buttons. She's using silverware more. She continues to love helping in the kitchen - I'm considering introducing sharp knives, under careful supervision of course. She loves having "jobs" at school, so we're thinking of making a job chart at home.

Along the same big-kid lines, she is full of questions these days about age limits. How old does she need to be to ride in the front seat? To drive? To have pierced ears? To put things in the oven by herself? To get married? When she's ninety-nine, will she be old enough to go to the Hippo (the neighborhood gay dance club)? An an outgrowth of this, she has taken to informing us about her plans to change our rules when she grows up. When she's a grownup, for example, there won't be any limits on screen time or desserts. For her or her children. She does recognize that it won't all be gravy, though: "When I'm a grownup veterinarian, I will not be able to go to church. Because some animals might get sick on Sunday and need me to take care of them."

She's got a bunch of fears. I know that fears are common in the preschool period, so probably it's partly developmental. Sometimes she seems to be trying fears on to see what they're like - for example, suddenly claiming to have a fear of dogs. Some of her fears appear to be genuine, like her recent clinginess and separation/school anxiety; perhaps they're related to her cognitive abilities outstripping her emotional coping skills. We provide a lot of reassurance and also try to teach and model coping strategies. She goes through periods where she has frequent nightmares, and then other periods where she sleeps soundly.

She's a very sweet, affectionate kid. I am really looking forward to having more of a lap to hold her in. In fact, all in all, Alex is pretty awesome all around. Let's hope that it's possible to get this lucky twice.