A Boy and His Blog

Posts Tagged ‘letters’

Owen is three and half.  He is going through a difficult time lately.  He is very emotional and angry.  He seems to have a permanent scowl on his face.  He is having a hard time getting adjusted to his cousin Lyric being over so much.  I am now watching her almost full time.  It is very good for Owen, and Lyric is teaching him so much, but it is very challenging as well.  He is getting much better and more used to it.  At first he would have a melt down pretty much anytime she touched one of his toys.  He is learning that it is more fun to play while she is here then to try to protect every single one of his toys.  He still walks around clutching about three or four toys that he wont let go of the whole time she is here.  Sometimes I offer to put them up on the fridge for him (because his point in holding them is to keep them away from Lyric), but then he just grabs about three or four more toys and holds on to them.  He is playing more of the time now and rarely has a melt down.  It’s getting easier and easier and sometimes they disappear into his room for long stretches of time.  Lyric is a very good influence on Owen.  He used to never touch his pretend play stuff, but now when she is here he will walk out with a hat on and a sword in his hand.  Every day they play “mermaid and pumpkin head” and this game entails them having a play silk tied around them like a cape, and then running in a circle so their cape flies up in the air.  Lyric will repeatedly say “I’m a mermaid, I’m a mermaid” and Owen will repeatedly say, “I’m a pumpkin head, I’m a pumpkin head”.  We also constructed a fort for them out of cardboard, and a sheet that we throw over the top.  They love it and they play in it every day.  They have colored it with crayons, and Daddy put a hole in it for a large tube to go which they talk to each other through or roll balls through.  Owen is starting to be tender to Lyric.  He will say “Oh, you did a good job Lyric” or he’ll say, “I’m gonna go check on Lyric” then he will walk into the room and say “how’s it going Lyric?” then he will say “just call me if you need me” before he leaves.  It’s very good to see some protective nurturing feelings coming out in him.

Owen’s anxiety is still present and showing itself often.  Having Lyric here has really shown me just how atypical Owen is.  She falls asleep at nap time after about 5 or 10 minutes of me sitting at the end of her bed reading a magazine.  When Owen would nap, he would not fall asleep for 30 minutes to one hour of me singing to him or sitting right next to him.  When Lyric is sad she accepts comfort and snuggles.  When Owen is sad he tries not to cry and if I talk about it or try to hug him he yells at me and pushes me away.  Lyric dances, she sings with inflection in her voice, she plays pretend.  Owen is actually dancing and singing now.  He “sings” the words to a song in a completely flat way.  He will dance a bit every morning when Ellen dances on her show, but he will tell me to stop before she is done dancing.  Owen is surely unique, and we respect his individual personality.  It is sometimes hard to know how to handle things in a way that he will be okay with, but we are learning as we go.

Owen is doing amazing things with letters though.  He figured out that certain words start with certain letters and he is constantly asking us now what words start with “O” or “L” or “M” or ay other letter he can think of.  He can identify every letter and he will read them off when he sees them on t-shirts or signs.  He will sometimes even say, “what does mmm-mmm-mmmonster start with” and then he will proclaim, “oh, it starts with M!”  He can figure out a few words by himself as far as what they start with.  He argues with us that “Ellen starts with L” and “Emmaline starts with M” not “E”.  The other day he asked us in a very puzzled way, “what does ch-ch-chair start with?”  We explained that a “C” and an “H” together make a “ch” sound.  I’m really amazed that he is doing this at three and half.  It isn’t really that amazing that a three and half year old can do this stuff, but what I am amazed about is that we haven’t taught him any of this stuff.  I mean sure, we play with alphabet blocks and he watches “Word World” but I’ve deliberately not pushed this kind of thing in favor of encouraging pretend play, which is the area he needs more work on.  I really don’t understand how he knows so much about letters and their sounds when I barely ever expose him to that stuff.  I think Daddy does more letter games then I do with him, but still, it’s not that much.  At a restaurant the other day he had his little menu with crayons and James said “here Owen, you can write your name on this”.  I then laid into James about not pushing him to write his name and how he is too young to be using that small muscle set and that even though his brain is ready his body isn’t, and as I’m saying all this Owen was actually WRITING HIS NAME!!!  I had no idea he could do this, and I don’t believe it’s appropriate at this age, but holy crap!  He wrote an “O” in one corner, then a “W” in the other, then an “E” under the “W”, then an “N” under the “O”.  Each letter was hard to identify but it was possible.  The menu got ruined with water or I would have saved it, but it was amazing.  I don’t want to ask him to do it again though, because I don’t want to encourage something he isn’t physically ready for.  I am hoping he does it again on his own so I can save it.  He is one smart child, and the way he picks up on concepts that we never introduced him to is just crazy.  Like the whole gravity thing.  He walked around saying “gravity pulls me down” and every time he would fall he would say “gravity pulled me down”.  I asked James why he was introducing him to the concept of gravity already because I’m not sure he is ready for that and James said he didn’t know how he learned it.  Well, later I realized there is a line in one of his books that says “gravity holds you to the earth” or something like that.  He seems to understand concepts that he shouldn’t be ready to learn yet.