Ace's Advances

I've been spending a lot of time talking about Ace's sleep progress it's true, now before you skip over this post in your reader assuming it is yet another post about that very subject, don't. Fear not, it isn't. No today, I wanted to tell you all about Ace's ever expanding vocabulary, ability to count, know left from right, and colors! Yes, while he is far from perfecting the English language he is well on his way to developing a vast vocabulary. He is getting very good at parroting words - many words - and many of those he's including in his regularly used vocabulary. So what new words has Ace added since these? Well to the best of my documenting....

turtle, owl, copter (helicopter), trash, truck, rock, walk, street, hot dog, bush, crocdoe (crocodile), milk, ownj (orange), baa (bath), bobble (bottle), juu (juice), cook, go, anu (aunt), vower (flower), dog, teeth, feet, poop...

The list I am sure is not exhaustive and perhaps he's even been saying a couple of those since before he turned 17 months and he has uttered his first phrase (a separate post coming soon!) We are very proud of how well he seems to be hearing and understanding language. We read to him several times a day, in fact there are some days I feel all we do is read! Although often on those days it is only a page or two of one book before we're onto another one.
He recognizes what a 'number' is and will point to them in his books - although he hasn't quite associate one with the # 1, or two with the # 2, etc, but of course it is a process and he is well on his way. He can discern between one and two things and now seems to be adding three into the mix as well. However, he does not do it every time and he never does it when I turn the video camera on. Siigh. :)

In the last few days he's been doing very well knowing which is his left hand and which is his right hand. We have tested in a dozen times in various scenarios and so far he's about 85% correct so I feel confident that he's beginning to properly distinguish his left from his right - at least as far as it extends to his hands. In one other scenario dealing with his turtle nightlight I told him he had to turn it on first before he could change the colors. The buttons are grouped three and then fourth is offset from the others. I told him he had to push the button on the right. Now whether he understood 'on the right' to be a direction or merely the title of that button - I'm unable to decipher, but he does know that the 'button on the right' turns on the light and the other three change the colors.
Speaking of colors - he is doing very well at identifying - blue, red, and purple. Yellow and orange are not far behind - green is rare and black, brown, pink, white, etc. I haven't really introduced beyond the books we read on colors.

He has always been very intuitive at identify objects that he has previously been shown. So if he sees a dog he will say dog. If we ask him to point out of a series of flash cards he's reviewed before he can remember which one is a 'heart' by sight and many others. He can translate what he sees in one place and identify it in another. For example he has a wall quilt that has many animals on it, when we use his flash cards he identifies all of those animals from the quilt by sight. So the first time we laid out the animal flash cards and asked him to point to the zebra he did, monkey, elephant, and the list goes on! We are very proud of him!
We have started to teach him the alphabet. He received the Leap Frog Fridge Phonics Magnets as a gift for Christmas and loves to play with it while we're working in the kitchen. So he's *sort of* learning his sounds from that although we try to repeat them as he's playing with it - so he can hear it from a human tongue. I have noticed that the "T" has become much more pronounced since listening to it on the Leap Frog toy. So when he says 'turtle' it is very clearly 'turtle'
The other night we spent an hour reading through one of his favorite books Sesame Street ABCs - it's one of my least favorite books because he doesn't typically want to engage with the point of the book more just flip through it over and over. But the other night he was content to sit with me and learn 'A' 'B' and 'C' and the front of the book has an 'A' 'B' and 'C' on the cover so after spending a fair amount of time inside the book on those letters and word associated with them I closed the book and we went through what does 'cat' start with and he would point to the letter 'C' on the cover. However the next day he wasn't able to recall it when asking him in front of his father. This could be again a refusal to perform or simply that he hadn't retained the knowledge. Either way we continue to review 'A' 'B' and 'C' and add a few more as he seems interested in sitting and learning.
He's still young, not yet 18 months so honestly we don't try to force him to learn anything at this point. He doesn't sit in any chair and have 2 hours of 'school' when we do flash cards it usually is accompanied with running around the house between answering questions and sometimes the flash card sessions last 10 minutes others last 30 seconds. We do read to him every day and we usually go over at least one color every day - focusing on 'red' things in the house or 'blue' things on another day. He's a busy boy and doesn't always like to play along and that's ok. He's developing and learning wonderfully.