Sleep Splendor

In case I haven’t mentioned it lately Zane still, for the most part, takes an afternoon nap. It’s one of those things where he’s all “no nap, no nap” and then crash!, he’s sound asleep. For some reason it reminds me of a Gilligan’s Island episode (or most of them) but it’s probably not worth trying to explain. The late naps are still the roughest to recover from and he wakes up a grumpy, sweaty, “NO!” zombie that doesn’t want to do much but snuggle into someone and watch curious george. Saturday’s after a full day of running all over the place I can usually get him to by one or so and after a couple hours he’s in a pretty good mood. But there are no guarantees.

Lessee, what else is new? Learning. All kinds of learning. He’s seems to have reluctantly decided that he knows colors. First everything was green, for a long time. Then everything but green. Mostly I think he likes toying with our fragile little color obsessions, but lately when reading a book his defenses slipped and he identified all of the colors correctly. He’s pretty good with numbers and counting and lately he’s been able to count things without stopping to think about it and using his fingers. He’ll just say two rabbits or three trucks.

As for letters he can recite the alphabet no problem and can identify most letters when asked, some of them he just picks out on his own (especially “O”). I picked up a phonics type app for the iPad which uses pictures and the sounds of the letters, never using their names. Unfortunately the developer triggers a “cute” little animation when you pick the wrong letter and so now Zane does his best to pick the wrong letter until the last minute. Kind of an inverse learning mechanism, which is probably ok, but frustrating if you are the parent sitting next to him.