brood

(I was dressing Levi and he was doing the funniest kicks and talking a lot about our “one foot, too feet” game that I used to get his pants on… so this is the conversation that began during that)

Daddy – “Are you out of your mind?” (sometimes you just have to address the weirdness with playful and stupid questions like this.)
Levi – “Nope”
Daddy – “Are you out of your mind?” (i set him down at this time, he walks off toward the books)
Levi – “Noooooaahhh” (his dipthongs are wild)
Daddy – “Are you out of your mind?”
Levi – “Noooo”
Daddy – “Do you know where your mind is?”
(silence, he stops for a second)
Daddy – “Where is your mind?” (levi starts walking again)
Levi – “Rieeght Heeow” (right here, that is. he is pointing to the curls on the back of is head)

So, I have no idea why he answered that way. I’m not sure than anyone has tried to teach him where his “mind” is… or his brain for that matter. We should do the brain bit… but unless you are some kind of zombie, or perhaps if you’ve been trepanned (perhaps there are other medical situations i should be sensitive to, but…) you can’t really expect a 20 month old child to get that there is an organ called a brain inside a head. can you? (this does remind me that i have this illustrated multilayered anatomy of the human head which might be a helpful teaching aid. or i guess gray’s anatomy is on-line… hrm.)

Another conversation:

(i’m holding a green colored plastic disk with a black letter “w” printed on it. this is a piece to a toy frog game. you load the frog up with these disks, then hit a button on its back and it spits them out. older kids, like myself, might sequence the disks to spell out words or something, but levi just likes to get the disks as they are spit out and set them in a specific place. he really likes collection and arrangement type activities like this. anyway, i’m holding this green “w” disk, and like an adult, i decide to quiz him about letters, something i don’t really care if he knows about, but was kind of curious whether he understood what a letter is…)

Daddy – “What letter is this?”
Levi – “Green”
Daddy – “Good, yes that is the color, but what letter is it?”
Levi – “Black” (he’s smiling, i think he is really trying to please at this point. so cute.)
Daddy – “Right, that is the color of the letter… let’s see, what “ABC” is this?”
Levi – “Dubba-you”

Wow. I quizzed him on a few more, and he knew a few more, like “I” and “L” and “E”… I think Juju has been teaching him how to spell his name, and he picked up “W” from the hilarious Bert and Ernie skit, where Bert leads a meeting of the National Association of W Lovers. I just didn’t think he knew what “letters” meant, and he doesn’t – he knows what ABCs are though. Of course, he loves the ABC song, and has an ABC book, and watches a bunch of Sesame Street (Or did, until the time change…). He’s had a lot of alphabet exposure. Probably too much for some people’s tastes. Anyway, this was a funny little exchange, i thought.

Other funny exhanges are:

“What are you doing?” reply : “Doo doo doo doooo” (i guess that is how this question sounds to him, but he thinks it is super funny, because when we are asking this we are often wondering if he’s doing mischief.)

We sing the “One Fine Face” song to him, and at the end let him sing the last word. He really hams it up saying/singing… “fayyyyyyyyyycssssss” like only a toddler can…