ABC Breakthrough

One of the pleasures of parenting is that moment of realization that comes after you've put in long hours in an attempt to teach your child something important -- where their fingers and toes are, names of household objects, or the ABC's. We stumbled upon this yesterday in the car, when we were absentmindedly singing the alphabet song and K. actually helped us finish some of the letters!

To wit: for a while now, he's been fascinated by the letter B. For example, he'll say it after I say "A" ... but then he used to say it, also, after any other sequence of letters, which was pretty amusing. But yesterday my mom sang the letters up to F and paused... and what did we hear but a little triumphant "G!" from the back seat.

We tried it again, pausing before "P"... and sure enough, a small voice sang out, "P!" with perfect timing. He doesn't know all the letters perfectly, of course, but his knowing a handful of them at just about 16 months makes me very excited.

Now, don't worry, I'm not going to rush out and buy a bunch of alphabet books and start the phonics drills morning, noon, and night (although I'll confess we do have ABC magnets on our fridge at home, and his increasing interest recently prompted me to buy a set of Dr. Suess ABC cards... but really that's just because K. loves to play 52 pickup with any sort of playing card, so why not be learning something as he throws the cards into the air?)

But it is darn exciting to see how my investments have paid off. By "investments" I mean singing the ABC song at every opportunity, whether it's during diaper changes or in the car when I'm trying to get him to stop melting down, or at the end of the day as we wind down before bed. I can sense he's at the age where moments like these will become more frequent, and .... hooray for that!