The Age of Wonder

So now I have a four and a five-year-old. My girls can swim, plié and chassé, String Bean can read like lightning, and Peanut knows the name of every animal she’s ever seen. It’s getting harder and harder to keep up with their little sponge minds, but I’m loving every minute of it.

String Bean suddenly wanted to learn to write in cursive, so I set her up with a sample sheet of cursive letters and a blank sheet of lined paper and let her rip. She dabbled for a half hour and now is doing her homework in such fancy script that I’m worried her kindergarten teacher will think I’m doing it for her.

Peanut wants to know everything about everything, down to the most intricate details of how long cars are supposed to pause at stop signs and how books are produced. She’s learning to read herself, mimicking her big sister and adopting the same habit of simply memorizing every word she comes across. From the back seat I hear her shout out the words we pass that she now recognizes: “Stop! Guest! Park! Hill! Halloween!” These simple moments fill me with such joy that I cannot believe I ever thought I was happy before them.

Over dinner they ask me to translate endless terms into Spanish and when their dad is traveling we pull out a globe and plot his travels. In this way they now know the names of a variety of countries and continents. They like to try food from the countries he’s in, or at least String Bean does. Peanut wants to see it, smell it, ask endless questions about what makes Chinese food different from Italian, and Japanese different from French, but most nights she sticks closely to her good old yogurt diet.

I’m sure when I was their age I learned the same way, more by the world around me than in school. I have strong memories of sitting with my father while he read the newspaper and asking endless questions about all that we saw in there, and his patience in answering each one. I remember that my mother never used baby talk or simplified sentences, she just talked to me as if I could understand everything she said, and, eventually, I could.

We still have plenty of emotional drama from String Bean and stubborn battles with Peanut’s iron will, but overall, I’m really enjoying this age. The age of wonder and knowledge and the misguided belief that I have the answers to every one of their questions.

Nap Time

Before nap time and bed time, there is story time. In String Bean’s case, this can mean coloring, practicing reading or writing, or listening to me read her a story. In Peanut’s case, it means I read her a story, and then she “reads” it back to me. She has an uncanny ability to memorize entire books almost line by line, and can recite the story as she flips through the book, giving the impression that she really is reading. If you listen closely, you can hear her edits on the original story, as she throws a line about a bird into The Cat in the Hat or an extra conversation with Sam into Green Eggs and Ham.

Her room used to be our guest room, and the guest bed is still in there, shoved into a corner, unused except during story time. We sit together as I read, and then I lay down and listen to the lilting rise and fall of Peanut’s voice as she takes her turn reading. On more than one occasion, I’ve felt myself drifting toward sleep as she reads to me, so I understand the reason this has been a part of bedtime rituals for generations.

The other day, I was listening to her read Peter Rabbit, and the next thing I knew she was elbowing me roughly, giggling, asking why I’d elbowed her. I think I must’ve nodded off, and then elbowed her as I twitched in my sleep. I’m thinking maybe I should record her soft, soothing reading voice and play it to help me sleep on nights when insomnia has the upper hand.

Reading

We had a little breakthrough on the reading front last night. My 4-year-old had given up the nightly bedtime story in favor of flash cards, this reading thing becoming like a hunger to her. After a few frustrating false starts with words far too complicated for an on-the-cusp reader, but that she refused to skip (butterfly, caterpillar, grasshopper), I sorted the cards when she wasn’t looking, pulling out all of the three-letter words (ant, cat, dog, owl, pig, cow, bee, some others I can’t remember now).

She knows all of her letters, and all of the sounds they make, so she was quick to say “a-n-t” then “ah nnn t,” but lazy about trying to run them together, wriggling around, begging to see the picture on the other side of the flash card to see what the word was. She fidgeted some more, then repeated the letters, then the sounds of each letter, and then suddenly sat bolt upright. “Ant!” she yelled. “It says ant!” she looked at me for confirmation and I flipped the card over to show her the ants pictured on the back. She squealed, flipped over backwards, kicked her legs in the air, then begged for more.

We made it through about a dozen cards, and she got every word, the switches in her brain flipping a little faster with each new attempt, the word coming to her a little easier, her excitement mounting after each success. After we’d completed the stack, when she wanted to move on to the four-letter words I’d set aside, I insisted it was time to sleep instead. I was thrilled to be there for the moment when everything finally lined up in her brain to read, really read, for the first time. I was high-fiving her after every word, hugging her and telling her how proud I was that she didn’t give up and kept trying until she got every one of them. Okay, I’ll admit, I was every bit as excited as she was. But it was getting late, so I did my best to calm us both down, and put her to bed.

Fifteen minutes later I heard a loud, gleeful cackle on the monitor, followed by a long giggling session. I went up to her room, to remind her that her sister was asleep next door, and found her squirming around in her bed, legs cycling above her. “I’m too excited to sleep!” she yelled. I hushed her, listened patiently as she brain-dumped the million thoughts keeping her awake, then told her that sleep helps your brain work even better, and this finally convinced her to settle down and try to sleep. A little while later I heard the telltale sound of sleep-breathing on the monitor.

I can’t wait for our next reading session together, tonight if she’s up for it, but not if she isn’t. I won’t push, risking turning this into anything less than good-natured fun. But next time I’ll try to start a little earlier, with some proper calming-down time scheduled afterwards.

ABC

This morning my 2-year-old and I were reading together while her big sister was at preschool. She chose a book geared toward early readers, with a letter-matching page (matching the upper case letter to its lower case counterpart) and proceeded to name each letter on the page. I knew she had learned a few letters here and there, but I had no idea she knew almost the whole alphabet. Since I haven’t taught her all of these letters, it stands to reason that her sister has been her tutor when I wasn’t paying attention.

That’s two big differences with second children: you aren’t as keenly aware of each little baby step toward some new milestone, so they sort of sneak up on you, and they also have another role model in the house that they look up to even more than you, and learn from better than from you. I remember when I was pregnant with our second daughter, and the pediatrician pointed to my belly and said, “Be prepared. The second child does everything much younger than the first one did.” And he was right. She knew how to use the dog’s hand commands for sit, down and stay before she could walk. She knew how to go up and down the stairs safely without the weeks of training we had to put in with the first kid. She hated baby food on sight, and wanted to eat what big sister was having, despite her lack of teeth (neither of my girls had a single tooth until they were over a year old). And, apparently, she has learned her letters and numbers while I was busy doing the dishes.

I’m eager to see what new skills she’ll acquire next, and I’ll try to do a better job of eavesdropping on those private lessons she’s getting from her big sis. Maybe I’ll even throw in a few suggestions, like: “How about you work on potty training her for me?” or “Can you teach her about laundry sorting?” My four-year-old, clothes-hound that she is, is an expert laundry sorter. Surely that skill’s ready to be passed along.

Night Owl

The other night, as I was headed to bed, I heard a loud thump in my daughter’s room. The noise was too loud to be made by a sleeping child, so I went in to investigate. What I found, at midnight, was my 4-year-old, with all of the lights on in her room, lying in the middle of her bedroom floor flipping through a book.

“What are you doing?” I asked?

“Reading,” she answered, as if that were the most natural thing to be doing at midnight, with school the next day.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?”

She looked around her room, as if realizing for the first time that there was a bed in there, then down at her strawberry pajamas, and shook her head. “I don’t want to sleep.”

We negotiated for a few minutes on that one, but she just kept insisting that she didn’t need to sleep, so I had to get stern and order her back to bed. I lingered near the monitor until I heard the tell-tale deep breathing of a sleeping child, then went to bed myself. The next morning, predictably, she was sound asleep when it was time to get up for school. I hate rousing a sleeping child, especially one as cranky as mine is in the morning. But I got her up, convinced her to drink some milk, managed to get her dressed and out the door only a few minutes late for school. When I picked her up a few hours later, she was so tired that she insisted we head straight home, rather than spending her usual twenty minutes playing on the school front lawn with the other preschoolers.

She lounged on the couch, eyes at half-mast, while I got a few bites of lunch into her. I put her down for a nap, hoping for a cheerful evening with a well-rested child, only to hear her climb out of bed a few minutes later. I went back in, put her back to bed, amazed that a child with such dark circles under her eyes, who could barely keep her eyes open, was refusing to sleep. A few minutes later I heard her get up again. We went several rounds of this, with me putting her clearly exhausted body back into bed, and her hauling it back out again.

Now, I know (and am reminded daily) that 4-year-olds are all about exerting their ever-growing will on the world around them. But isn’t this a little ridiculous? Shouldn’t she be getting that out of her system with bossing her sister around, and be willing to sleep?

Learning to Read

My four-year-old is on the cusp of learning to read. At school they’re focused on sounding out the words, one letter at a time. She gets this concept, knows her letters, and can make the appropriate sound for each. The next step, according to her preschool teacher, is flowing those sounds together into the whole word. This part seems to be giving her some trouble. It’s almost as if she’s refusing to do it out of spite. She’s happy to name the letters, make each sound the letters make, but if you push her to run the sounds together, she’ll quit the game and refuse to play anymore. The fact that this stubborn streak in her reminds me wholly of myself at her age fills me with equal parts dread and pride.

Anyway, the other day, as I was attempting to read a sentence or two in my book, she walked up and glanced at the cover. “That says ‘baby’” she told me, pointing. I flipped the book over to see that, in fact, it did say baby. I asked how she knew that and she spelled the word, then made the sound for each letter, then said baby again. I can tell she didn’t sound out the word, just recognized it from somewhere, which seems an awful lot like reading to me. When I praised her for it, she simply shrugged and walked off.

Later that same day, she wanted a Gogurt. We have two kinds, strawberry and berry. She opened the fridge, announced that she wanted a berry one, and picked up a tube and pored over it for a minute. “This one’s berry,” she announced. Figuring she was full of it, I looked over her shoulder. “See?” she said, “B-e-r-r-y. Berry.” I was stunned. Who taught this kid to read?

I tried showing her other words, to see what else she knew, but predictably, once put on the spot, she shut down and refused to cooperate. I backed off and haven’t tried again. I’m giving her a couple days break before I broach the subject again. If she’s anything like her mama (and I know she is), she’ll have the skill fully mastered before she unveils it.