brutal honesty

The day before yesterday Jackson and I were getting our pajamas on and Jack said, "Mommy, my nipples are higher than yours! Mine are way up here, and yours are down there."

. . . sigh . . .

reading some more

Yesterday we were in the car driving to Gramm and Gramps and Jackson told me that "S . . T . . . O . . . P . . spells stop!" I said, "Yes! Do you know what "G . . . O spells?" After a few seconds of silence he said "GO!"

doing math

It's hard to tell sometimes when Jackson is getting the question right, and when he is guessing and just getting lucky. Yesterday Jill asked him, "If I had three cars, and mommy had two cars, how many cars would we have if we put them together?" and Jackson immediately spits out "five!" and keeps playing. But when we try to get him more focused and listening to what we are asking, he gets it wrong unless we help him by showing him fingers. He seems to be pretty good at "5." If it is four plus one, or two plus three, he knows the answer is five. Beyond that he is pretty lost.

It is different, however, if he is thinking about things on his own and we are not quizzing him. A few days ago he was following his Gramm into the kitchen to get his quarters that he had "earned" that day for helping them with chores. He was talking to his Gramm about how many quarters he had earned. He said, "I got two from helping Gramps, and one from helping you, so that makes three!" He talks to himself about small numbers like that pretty often. It is so cool to hear.

He is also able to visualize abstract things and count them -- which is awesome. Several weeks ago we were talking about shapes and Jill asked him how many sides a square has. He stopped and looked up into the air and said, "one, two, three, four, five . . . five!" He did the same thing for triangle.