Letters and Logic

Liam has not been letting his brain rot during his break from preschool.  In fact, he has a completely new skill that I was not aware of.  I'm not sure when or how he acquired it.  I know he has been learning to write his name by tracing it at preschool and that the letters have gotten much more "standard" lately.  And he has been able to recognize the letters of the alphabet for a long time.  For mother's day, though, we got a card for "Grammy" (my mom) that had a place in the back for the two of them to write down what they enjoyed doing together most.  After discussing it Liam said that his favorite thing to do was "snuggle."  Then Grammy told him the letters and he wrote them down.  Here's a picture of the result.  (Grammy's favorite joint activity is baking cookies.  In the background you can just see a tiny teacup that Grammy and Grandpa brought back from their recent trip.)

He also still likes to play with the magnetic letters on our fridge - especially when I'm busy cooking and he'd rather be in the kitchen than alone in the living room, but we don't have room for toys in the kitchen.  He has done projects before where he arranges the letters in alphabetical order.  Sometimes he needs help in finding specific letters in the jumble, and sometimes he needs encouragement about his ability to recite the letters until he gets to the one that comes next.  So he gets some interaction, which he wants, and I can still get supper ready.  Recently he decided to add a new twist to this activity - a stair step pattern.  Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's one of the partially finished product.  It looks like some kind of code to me.

Then, of course, there are various topics that Liam is thinking about.  Yesterday he came into the kitchen walking on his heals, with his toes in the air.  He said, "This is how poor people walk."  When I asked him why he thought that - what having little money had to do with walking a certain way - it turned out that he hadn't realized that being poor was associated with how much money a person had.  Then he wanted to know if Uncle Isaac and Aunt Cindy are poor.  No, I told him.  How about their children?  No, I responded.  He disagreed with me since as far as he's ever seen his three and one year old cousins do not have any money at all.  I told him that since Uncle Isaac and Aunt Cindy use their money to take care of their children it's as if the kids themselves have the money.  He accepted that, but was happy to have his "own" supply of money - a jar on his nightstand filling up with change he finds around the house.

Today he asked me, "Do other people have the same life as me?"  Well I'm not going to try to answer that one without a few more details!  His example was a friend of his who also attended his preschool - did going to the same preschool mean that she had the same life as him?  Well I said that it meant that her experiences were "similar."  He wasn't satisfied with that.  His conclusion was that they were "the same."  I didn't try to take the discussion any further than that and he let it drop - for now.