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Beaner Update

Wanted to give a quick Beaner update before this stage passes completely, and I don't remember it.

Reading and Writing
I've been dying for the Beaner to learn how to read, mainly because reading has brought me countless hours of enjoyment (I have fond memories of eating peanut butter english muffins and reading for three hours straight on our jalousied porch with my sister and then doing all our chores in the last 30 minutes before my mom got home from work when I was in junior high), and I want him to have that enjoyment, too. Reading will also give him one more way to amuse himself without relying on us or a nanny for entertainment.

I know he's only 3.5 years old, so it's not like he's going to be reading novels anytime soon, but I figure anything I can do to make him *want* to read—and to realize he can already read more words than he thinks—can't be a bad thing. We now read letters together (he LOVES getting letters), and sometimes I'll ask him to read his books to me instead of the other way around. He doesn't always have patience for this, and he still gets more enjoyment out of me reading to him, but there are definitely some moments of pride when he realizes that he can read ENTIRE SENTENCES all by himself.

On a related note, his favorite thing to do these days is write. He writes pages and pages of words, creates signs to tell his dad to keep out of the living room, and is constantly asking us, "what comes after 'n' in 'and'?" (or whatever other word he's trying to spell). I think the writing thing is partly a result of Montessori teaching, which emphasizes learning to write before learning to read, though it's also probably just an extension of his love of drawing and coloring and pencil-sharpening.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
Lately the Beaner's been telling the stupidest jokes ever, a phase I seem to recall from my nephew's childhood circa age 4 or 5. I suspect I have only more dumb jokes in my future...or, to be more accurate, actual dumb jokes. Right now most of the Beaner's jokes are not just not funny, they're incomprehensible. He has the rhythm of joke-telling down, but not the sense.

Harry Potter and the Book of Mormon
We spent a recent weekend at a hotel in Bethlehem, PA, where we visited the nearby Crayola factory, picked peaches at a farm, bought goodies at the Easton Famer's Market, and took a ride in a carriage pulled by a horse named Jack. We arrived at the hotel at around the Beaner's bedtime on Friday night, and while Al readied the pull-out couch in the room, the Beaner went in search of a bedtime story. He found one in the nightstand.

"Look, it's a book of five stories!" he said, waving the Book of Mormon in my direction.

"I'm not sure that's a story you'll enjoy," I said.

"It's not ONE story," he replied. "It's FIVE stories!"

"Oh yeah? Which five stories are in that book?"

"Harry Potter's Dirty Face, Harry Potter Loses a Tooth..."

We never got to hear the other three because Al and I burst out laughing and interrupted the Beaner's train of thought.

And Finally, Some Wisdom From Al
This was said to the Beaner when the latter insisted he couldn't read his new Clifford the Big Red Dog book because he didn't know the story yet (despite the fact that all the words in the book are ones he knows; it's why we got it for him), but I wrote it down because it's in keeping with my sticky-note mantras:

It's one of the great ironies of life that you learn most when you feel like you don't know anything.