Connor 2.8

Connor is two years and eight months old today! Sometimes I forget that he is still two. "How old are you?" I catch myself asking him scoldingly from time to time, when he does certain things I consider immature or foolish. Then I remember, oh yeah, he is only two. Closer to the three side, but still two. Give him a break. But not too much of one, right? He still should know better.

All in all, he is a great kid. This week he's been very whiny and prone to tantrums; I think it's because he's very tired. He's had some timeouts and has learned that it hurts when you hit something hard in a fit of anger. I planned to let him "sleep in" this morning, but don't you know he was up before six, on his "day off."

So what is he doing these days? "What is Connor up to today?" my mother always asks.

I think his joining the older kids at school has reinforced some of his skills. He's become more independent and very diligent about personal hygiene and cleanliness. He is good about cleaning up after himself and can be very thoughtful at times. He is still frighteningly observant. "He got a haircut!" he exclaimed last week about a clerk at the post office who had gotten a crew cut (to the surprise, I think, of the clerk). A few weeks ago he noticed that the American flag in front of his school was gone, and where was it?

Connor can now identify the lowercase letters of the alphabet, which I think is amazing for his age. He gets the difference between a capital I and a lowercase L and also has a grasp of "p" versus "q" (which I think I was still ironing out at age 5 or so). So he is spelling words and saying them (on paper, not aloud from memory). "Let me count them," he says, so if I tell him the word is "Canada," he will point to each letter as he spells "C-A-N-A-D-A" and then finish up with "Canada!"

We have a placemat featuring a map of North America that we look at from time to time, and he's been learning the 50 states. Yesterday, since it had been a week or so, I gave it to him. Usually I ask him to locate a state - he's learned maybe half of them -- i.e. "Where is Georgia?" But yesterday I asked him to tell me the ones he knew: point and name them himself. He started with Washington State, then moved on to South Carolina/North Carolina, then North and South Dakota. Random, right? Somewhere in there was Florida ("That's where Mary lives!" -- my cousin Mary, who's a teacher in FL. I found that it really helps to identify the state with someone he knows who lives there, which all you teachers recognize as a golden tenet of instruction: make the lesson relevant/relate it to the student's own experience. ) He also identified Michigan and Mississippi, or course. He got Texas when I asked, "Where do Carlos and Sofia [his second cousins] live?" Then he inquired about Canada, Mexico, and Oregon, and the conversation shifted to the blue on the map, which is water.

This afternoon Connor will have a visitor - my friend Maria in town from New York for Greek Orthodox Easter - and tomorrow we hope to go to the Double Decker Festival in Oxford. Look for pictures later on this weekend. Below are photos from last weekend's trip to the zoo.