Letters, crawling and fish

After nursing a sick child back to health, my reward is that I am now sick. Oh what joy. It's about 4am, and it is impossible to breathe through my nose...so I've given up on sleep. But that is good for you guys, because it means I have time to blog! Forgive me if any thoughts are incomplete, or words are spelled in whole new ways...I am tired, and full of ibuprofen and Afrin.

Lately, Zach has been obsessed with letters. Back in this post, I showed the artwork that I put in his room. It must have inspired him, because now we have a 2 1/2 year old that knows all his letters, and he's quickly learning the sounds as well. Honestly, it amazes me how kids can go from little newborns to grasping the idea of reading in such a short amount of time. The brain is impressive (sorry, that's my internal-geek coming out!). We took this video of Zach - we didn't coach him on the letters at all, and it's a favorite pastime of his now to "read" our t-shirts. The best part is that I sent it to some old friends from when I worked at Lockheed Martin, and they quickly passed it on to some high-level executives. Although it means nothing to him right now, Zach got to appear in all his letter-identifying glory at a staff meeting with some big names at Lockheed. Cool!



Now, we are moving on to learning the sounds of each letter, which is a little more challenging, but he is loving it so far.

Rebekah is crawling all over the place these days! Well, she switches between traditional crawling on her hands and knees to what we like to call "the wounded soldier crawl" on her forearms and tummy (she has a sort of limp with it too). It's pretty funny, and I plan on getting a video up of that ASAP. She is obsessed with Zach, and tries to follow him wherever he goes. When she can't follow, she watches intently, with a look that clearly tells us she's taking notes on how to do what he's doing. Because of her new-found mobility, Zach and Rebekah's worlds are officially colliding. This results in a lot of "No, baby sister!" and "Zach's car! Mine car." And of course, less articulate statements from Rebekah, such as "Waaaaaaaah!".

So, sharing has become the value of choice for now. I've also had to explain to Zach that his old baby toys that I have given to Rebekah are not his, but that we allowed him to play with them when he was little, and now Rebekah gets to play with them. I think this is the very early precursor to "who pays the mortgage around here?!" lecture that will be given in roughly 12 to 16 years from now.

A couple of weeks ago, we participated in a local charity fishing tournament. It was out at a fairly large pond, and we had 4 hours to catch fish. The biggest fish wins. Of course, in keeping with my experience in North Carolina so far, I caught nothing. But I enjoyed watching Zach "fish" and Rebekah's escape attempts. Here are some pictures from that day:







Now it it time for me to attempt to go back to sleep. I still can't breathe through my nose, but maybe exhaustion will allow me to sleep in spite of that. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!