Little EC got herself lost in the library today. She was reading in the kids’ section on the top floor; I was on the other side of the book case. When I came back around, she was gone. I searched the top floor, and having not found her, was on my way down the stairs to the second floor when I heard her voice coming from the first; she was crying and telling someone her name.

It seems she had gone looking for me, and had made her way to the main floor, and in distress had gone to a librarian to ask for help. We managed to get her calmed down and everything was fine; she had learned a good lesson about wandering off in a safe environment. She had also learned a good lesson about finding a trustworthy “helper” when she needed one. And the lesson has stuck, at least for now: she had some trouble falling asleep tonight because the scenario was replaying in her mind.

The other day at dinner, we (the adults) were talking about how individuals achieve their worth. As we were concluding that worth does not come from status, but as a result of “the content of their character”, little EC jumped in to say that people are important because of what is in their hearts, and what’s in their hearts is Jesus, and he’s important because he saved us from our sins on the cross. Well…it seems that some combination of parenting and Catholic preschool is bearing fruit…these are the things that warm a parent’s soul.

School has been overwhelmingly positive. The only cloud in the sky is that in the last few weeks little EC has been complaining that her classmates are mean to her. A little probing conversation unearths that what she means is that they are calling her mean, and she doesn’t think she’s done anything to deserve that. Also, something about kicking and pushing. A couple times she has said she doesn’t want to go to school because of this. I’ll have to have a chat with the teachers and find out what might be going on…

And on another high point, though I’ve forgotten to note it for months, as of January 8th we are officially a diaper-free house. That was the last night that any overnight training pants were needed, and we gave away the last of our stash a couple weeks ago.

We haven’t consistently done Bear School in a long time. Consistency in anything has been a challenge, actually, but we have managed to get the routine on school days more or less set in stone. Little EC still loves school like crazy. We had parent-teacher conferences a couple weeks ago (video conference, of course…nothing can be normal these days) and the teacher said she was very advanced verbally for preschool—and that despite being by far the youngest in the class. They’ve noted her literacy at school, and we have noticed it coming out in new ways at home as she is starting to try to read things around her independently (not with a lot of success yet, but the effort is clear). So a couple weeks ago I decided to try a new variant to up her numeracy.

She has a collection of little plastic “counting” bears that came as a gift from Grandma long ago. At first we used them to do patterns, to sort by colors and size, and some simple counting, but after awhile they became just more toys to be played with and imagined with (“choirs” of bears were a popular one). I used these bears as the basis for Bear Math. I now know that she has 31 of them (I don’t know how many came in the set originally!).

On a piece of paper, I drew three large boxes, with the first two separated by “+” and the second two by “=”. Under each box I drew a line on which to write a number, and also separated them by “+” and “=”. Then I put some bears in the first two boxes, say two and three. Then I showed her: count the bears in the first box, and write that number on the line below the box. “2”. Then count the bears in the second box and write that number on the line below. “3”. Then comes the fun part: push all the bears together into the third box, then count the bears in the third box and write the number on the line below. “5”. Then read it out loud: “The equation says: two plus three equals 5”. She caught on to this protocol right away, and within five or six iterations we were doing arbitrary additions that even made it into the double digits, even some numbers that she didn’t know how to write and I had to help with.

With that down, we changed the protocol: I would write the numbers on the lines below the boxes: “4” and “5”. Then she would count out four bears into the first box, five bears into the next box, then push them all together into the third box, count them out—”9″—and write that onto the third line. Then read it out loud: “Four plus five equals nine”. She picked up on that straightaway too. And now she just does it. I think she’s even become a little bored by it, because while she asked me often to do it in the first few days, she now doesn’t want to even when I suggest it.

There are two possible directions to go from here. I can either introduce subtraction through a similar protocol, or I can move the addition to higher numbers and introduce the concept of the tens place (one cheese cracker = 10 bears, and can be consumed on completion of the problem). I haven’t decided which to do yet.

In other “academic” news, she has been “studying” for awhile now, since she got a pad on which to write letters from Nana. She will sit with the pad on her lap, and look at the example letters on the inside cover, and practice writing letters. For the most part, she can form them all now, though “s” is tough (as is “5”, come to think of it). Just last week, she for the first time came home from school with her own untraced rendition of her name written on a piece of art: she had copied it from the name tag on her desk.

Like any good dad, I’m exceedingly proud and I think she’s the smartest four-year-old alive. But unlike other dads, I’m right.

For at least a year, we’ve been talking with little EC about school. Primarily because she has spent all her life with us, and never has gone to daycare or really spent any amount of time in a non-family situation, she has always expressed anxiety about leaving us. When we’ve taken her to Sunday school a few times, she always put up a fight the first week or two that we were there, and we never stayed in one place long enough for her to go to the same Sunday school more than three or four times. So the idea of spending 4–5 hours in school without us was completely foreign to her. But we’ve talked about it, in language that made it a “when” not an “if”, and praised the virtues of the fun and games and playgrounds that would be at her disposal. I think our cause was aided by the coronavirus, because she’s been even more than usual without friends her own age to play with for half a year.

At any rate, the day came—Wednesday the 2nd—and we walked her to the door of her classroom…or, rather, the large community space below the church where Pre-K4 has been established for the year to have a chance at keeping some social distance among 11 preschoolers. Wearing her unicorn-themed mask (which of course she picked off the rack at Target) she coerced the teachers into closing their eyes and holding out their hands to receive the presents that she was bringing them (she wanted to take them her favorite stuffed animals…I steered her toward some Lindt chocolate bars), and then marched right to the classroom door before turning and yelling, “Bye Daddy and Mommy!” Seeing that she had such confidence, we walked away before there was any chance for second thoughts on her part. I glimpsed her through the window as we left, though, and she was standing still at the doorway looking out…maybe looking for us.

Fast forward four hours, and when I picked her up and asked her how school was, she said “very good!”. Then she went on to describe how she got to play with a “potato person”, and try the monkey bars (but fell off the first bar) and play castle on the playground with a new friend, and eat her snacks…enthusiasm bubbling from every pore. We took her a second day and she happily stood outside with the teachers waiting for other classmates to show up while I left, and when I picked her up she had a card that she had drawn for me with markers of her and me doing “our favorite things” together. Hiking, flying on a plane to New Mexico, and two others that I was supposed to caption.

That was Thursday. She was disappointed to hear that she wasn’t going back on Friday, or Saturday or Sunday or Monday. And tonight during dinner she said that she wants to go to school all day, until dinner time. I’m torn between being ecstatic that she loves school so much, and wondering if she’s actually that bored with me! At any rate, I’ll take it.

Maybe it would be safer too. Because on her day off today, I took her out to ride her bike, and after a virtuoso performance riding circles around campus, she went out for one more lap and did a faceplant on the concrete halfway through. So when spending the day with me involves a swollen, bloody lip and a scratched-up nose…maybe school all day isn’t such a bad idea after all!

I suppose that there will be (and there have already been) many times when I feel like little EC is ‘growing up’. I’ve had that sense a lot in the last two weeks or so, as she has started to master all sorts of things that we have long helped her with.

I don’t remember when she started putting on her own underwear, pants, and socks, but it was a long time ago. Well over a year ago, long time. But the shirt always eluded her…after all, you can’t see yourself put on a shirt, you have to do it by feel. After watching a similar-aged friend of hers put on a jacket by laying it out on the ground just so, and then flipping it on to himself, I tried that strategy with her for shirts and it worked. So by March she was putting on her own shirt and just like that, we no longer had to dress her at all. (EM had to spend some time teaching her the concept of ‘matching’, which I was happy to ignore…but that’s pretty much done now too.)

In the last two months, here are some things she has started to do (correctly, consistently) for herself, in relatively chronological order:

• Brush her teeth
• Wipe #1
• Do a complete bath (washing, drying, brushing hair)
• Wipe #2

Actually that list came out shorter than I thought it would, but the difference in feeling is incredibly large each time we realize that she’s able to do these things and we don’t have to monitor them anymore. Last night EM and I sat and had a conversation over the end of dinner while EC gave herself a bath and reappeared ready for story time and bed. That’s a sea change!

We’ve had some issues in the last couple weeks with wetting. I’m not sure what happened that she suddenly started doing that again…it had been at least a month of nothing but dry underwear. Now she just seems to need to go often and almost as often doesn’t catch it. So we’re back to setting a schedule: before and after nap and bed, every hour or so otherwise, etc…it is slowly getting better. She doesn’t wear a diaper at nap time anymore. She was on track to lose it for bedtime too before this started. So I’m hopeful.

We got her a new bike with 20 inch wheels two weeks ago (her previous push bike had 12 inch wheels and was way too small). With the seat all the way down, she can just support it with her feet on the ground. As of today, we’ve taken it out six times for maybe 30 minutes each and she’s more or less mastered balance and pedaling. Today was the breakthrough on steering. I’m hopeful that before long we’ll get the breakthrough on starting and stopping. Then I’m going to need to get my bike fixed because it’ll be off to the races!

School starts two weeks from today. At not-quite-4, she’ll probably be one of the youngest in the class, but not only am I confident that she’ll fit right in, I do wonder if maybe I should have tried to pass her off as a kindergartener. We’ve noticed that in social situations she always plays much better with older kids, even up to 7 or 8.

She’s been pretty flexible the last few months. With the coronavirus and the shutdowns, we’ve been lacking in lots of her favorite things to do. We’ve spent significant time in three states and four cities, done one day-long and one four-day road trip, and she’s gone from sleeping on a nice bed at Grandma’s to an air mattress at Nana’s to the couch in a hotel where we are now. Every day she goes with me to our apartment to work on getting it fit for habitation, and she has put up with me having anywhere from zero to six hours’ worth of conference calls on weekdays.

The last month or so has not been ideal for her, with the instability of it all, but she has taken it so well that I take her good mood for granted. I probably shouldn’t. But more on that next time…when I talk about my strategy for dealing with her mood swings, and how I realized that while the strategy was working on her, it was probably working even better on me.

Last October (~6 months) ago, we came across this book when looking for ways to engage little EC with reading. The author claims that children in her little Canadian academy can read by 2 years old…so obviously we were behind with her having just turned 3! But EmpiricalMom really took to reading the book and trying out the strategies detailed therein. And what do you know…it works!

The fundamental strategy (which worked well for us, since little EC had already learned to identify letters and in many cases what sounds they make) was to create a “school” with her “friends” (stuffed animals, mostly bears) and have HER teach THEM how to read. With EM as the teaching assistant, and usually as the voice of the “friends”, EC’s task was to teach each friend the letters, their sounds, and to dispense treats to those friends that did well (and some for herself, naturally). Letters evolved into diphthongs, which evolved into words, which recently evolved into simple sentences. We are now, at about 3.5 years old, at the point where she can read specially prepared ~5-word sentences made up of words of 3–6 letters, usually in upper case.

There are lots more details about how the process has gone and how it works, but suffice it to say that it’s all in the book and that EM has done an amazing job adapting those suggestions to little EC.

We are hunkered down now “social distancing” to prevent the spread of COVID-19. (Some of her little “friends” have been “social distancing” as well, though they do it all together.) We’re lucky to be with my parents, with lots of land to run around on while staying away from people. Little EC and I spent the last two days building a garden out back to plant some vegetables; with Grandma she has already planted many more that are peeking out of the ground. There are many more days to go, but there is a lot more that we can do.

In the last few months little EC has developed very good table manners; very good conversational abilities; great posture and handling when drawing, coloring, or tracing letters; and in many ways is just seeming very grown-up. She exercises these abilities of hers on her own schedule, of course—some days she declines to employ them! But when she does I’m completely blown away by what she is capable of. Many people recently have confused her with a five year old. She’s still hugely taller than other kids her age. We’ve started measuring her on the wall of Grandma’s kitchen and we can see the inches pile up.

Another month passed, another milestone achieved.

Somewhere between October 23rd and November 17th—which day it was we don’t know, because we didn’t know it would be the last time until later—little EC stopped chewing on her “biting blankies”. These are the soft plush blankets that she was showered with as gifts when a baby, and with which we put her to sleep every night since the beginning. Somewhere around month 4 or 5 (did I document it? I don’t know…) we stopped giving her a pacifier at night, because she kept dropping it and getting upset because she couldn’t get it back. To compensate, she started chewing on her blanket, and she kept doing it every night, every naptime, and really whenever she could get her hands on them. We had to set firm rules that she could only have the blankets when it was time to sleep, or she would have dragged them around in her mouth from morning to night! As it happened, that policy meant she was always excited to get to bed or nap, because she got to have the “blankies”…and perhaps also because of that she would usually stay quiet and wait for a long time after waking before making any noise that might cause us to get her up.

Well, as of now the biting blankies are for biting in name only, because she stopped. We had been suggesting to her that as we traveled, we’d have fewer blankies on hand and if they all got dirty—and oh they did, after spending all night in her mouth—she’d have to spend some nights without them. But it wasn’t an intense pressure campaign, just some suggesting.

And psychologically, that she stopped biting the blankies must have removed another mental block for her, because at naptime on November 20th she declared that she wanted to sleep in the “big girl bed”…that is, a real bed and not her pack-and-play. (Good thing, too…she was way too big for the pack-and-play but still wanted to fold up into it.) We had originally thought that the lure of graduating to the big girl bed would be a good incentive, and so we said that she could make the move if she stopped biting her blankies. Wrong move, apparently, because she preferred the biting to the big bed. But once she had stopped biting of her own accord, there must not have been any reason left to stay in the pack-and-play. Two days later, we left town for Thanksgiving and for the first time in three+ years, we did not take a pack and play with us.

So far, so good. She hasn’t fallen out of bed yet (despite several nights on air mattresses and one naptime on a real bed without railings), which we might attribute to her being so old at this point that she doesn’t thrash around too much. In fact, she hasn’t even gotten out of bed yet. She has still been laying awake, sometimes singing, after she wakes up, waiting for us to come get her. We’ll see what the future holds, but for now, what a joy.

So the final tally for climbing out of the pack-and-play or crib is: twice on the pack-and-play (January 1 and 2 of this year), and once from the crib (sometime in the summer of this year, when she had dropped her blankie over the side and frantically tried to retrieve it). I wonder if any other parents have been so lucky. Best. Baby. Ever.

Tonight we had to put little EC into time out near the end of dinner—the infraction being a certain messy playing with food, and continuance of such playing despite increasingly loud demands that she stop—and Empirical Mom and I finished our meal while she sat in a corner in the next room.

It’s become clear to me that little EC is not at all like I was as a kid as regards punishment. I was always dejected whenever I was punished, and I walked around on eggshells after each time because I took it so hard. (At least, this is what I remember…) She, on the other hand, snaps back immediately after the punishment and sometimes in the middle of it. I think this is a coping mechanism, to some extent. She wants to be right—whenever we tell her she can’t do something, she immediately counters with something that she *can* do—and getting back to her joy is her way of overcoming the adversity of punishment. At any rate, she often starts talking and singing to herself while she sits in time out, even while she doesn’t budge from her place.

Tonight, while we finished dinner, she started singing in her time out, and we caught the words “Be careful, it’s my heart…” We had to think about it for a minute, but then it occurred to us that five or six days ago we had all sat down and watched the first half of Holiday Inn to kick off the season of Christmas movies. Little EC was enthralled by the singing and dancing—who are these people who need Sponge Bob Square Pants for their children?—and apparently she took it right in…because she had chosen to sing one of the songs from that movie while sitting in time out. She has an incredibly memory, even—or especially—when we don’t think she’s paying all that much attention.

I had to put little EC in a time out the other day. I don’t even remember what it was for, but I was angry about it. She was very upset. I thought she was upset about being put in time out. But when I went to get her out of time out, we had our talk as usual about why she was there and how she should behave differently, and then I told her to go apologize to her mom; but before she would go out, she insisted (in a little chagrined way) on scratching my back.

I was confused, but I let her. I’ve asked her to scratch my back lots of times, and she’s getting good at it. But then I realized: she thought that she could use it to make up with me after I was angry with her. It’s a little special thing that we share. And…it worked!

Keeping little EC’s eyes away from screens has been pretty important to us for the last two and a half years. Even when she was tiny, we’d turn her little swing away from the TV if we were watching something while she was with us. She’s not allowed to play with our phones and only when she was sick in the last few months did we sit down with her to watch a movie—she’s seen three now: Ratatouille, Brave, and Dumbo. The selection was based on Netflix availability more than anything, but it helps the cause that those movies aren’t merchandised at all (that I know of) so I can feel more confident that she won’t be mentally immersed in those worlds the way she might be with the princess movies or something more recent. We also sit with her after making popcorn and watch nature documentaries (Sir David Attenborough’s narrative voice is stuck in my head for all time).

But about a month ago, after seeing how well she could handle the concept of letters and sounds, counting and numbers, and sorting, I thought I should find some kind of organized curriculum that would help her and me make some real learning progress. There are no stores around here that would sell workbooks and the stuff that I’ve found dumpster-diving (ok, not literally diving…) is still beyond her level. But I was doing some browsing and I found that the nonprofit behind Khan Academy, which I’ve used and loved for college-level topics, has made an app called Khan Academy Kids that is focused on 2–5 year-olds. So I downloaded it and played with it myself a bit, and thought it would make a fun exercise.

She, of course, loves it. What’s not to love about cute music, animated animal characters, high-pitched voices, colorful videos, and learning? She picked up on the basics quickly: what constitutes a valid tap and a valid drag, for example. Sometimes the things she’s supposed to tap or drag are too small to be easy, and she gets frustrated, but by and large that’s not much of a problem.

The program is made up of a never-ending series of short (5–10 minute) segments that focus on one or a few letters (sounds, words that start with those sounds, tracing the letters, building words from the letters); math concepts (adding and subtracting, mostly by counting and dragging objects); colors, shapes, and sorting; or reading and comprehension exercises. It’s engaging: whenever a video is played, the narrator (a small animated bear) shows up from time to time to ask a question about the video and ask for something to be identified and tapped. It’s adaptive: it learns what she’s mastered and makes the work more difficult. And it’s thorough: I never knew there were so many different ways to reinforce what sound a letter makes. She is learning a lot, it is clear.

Little EC loves it, like I said; though sometimes a little too much. I sit with her, holding the phone, while she plays, and we talk about what she’s doing and I reinforce what the instructions are for the various activities. I also set the time limit: somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes, depending on how she’s doing with her frustration or anxiety level. Because interacting with the phone does make her anxious: she starts shifting in her seat, making jerky hand and head motions, and tapping persistently at the screen. Despite doing this for a month, with the same routine, sometimes she still is very upset when it’s time to finish, and her behavior is a little off for a period afterward. I feel as though it’s great for learning, but interacting with the phone is not great for her behavior. I’m hoping that with more ‘exposure therapy’—small doses over an extended period—she’ll become accustomed to it and start reaping the benefits of the technology without the behavioral or attentional drawbacks.

There isn’t a lot of customization available. I set the age of her profile to 3, though she was six months out from that when we started: the activities were just too easy on the 2 level. Some of the activities are persistently too easy, still. We’ve only gotten counting and math exercises up to 5 so far, and she can do up to 20 on her own with little problem. The letters exercises are a bit repetitive, though after a month we just today got introduced to a whole bunch of new letters so hopefully that problem will go away. The design of the curriculum was done in collaboration with the Stanford Graduate School of Education, so I’m inclined to trust them for a while and let the program run its course. If we go another couple months and I think it’s still too easy for her, I’ll bump the age level up again—though that will bring the problem of activities, like writing letters, that require better fine motor skills than she has right now.

In short, I’m hopeful that this program will advance her learning more than I could do with our normal daily activities; that she’ll overcome any addictive-like behaviors with repeated small exposures; and that she’ll start finding more ways to learn on her own as a result of all the new stimulation. It’s too early to tell, of course.

 

For months, I’ve been trying to get little EC to state her favorites: favorite food, favorite color, favorite song…but the concept of favorite just didn’t click. Today, though, as she got herself dressed for a nap (she can do all the articles of clothing herself now, except for the arms of her shirts), she declared that she needed “slippery socks” (those without rubber gripping pads on the bottom) to sleep, and that “rainbows are my favorite slippery socks”. So she pulled out the purple socks with rainbows, declaring she had found her favorites. And with that, and I having forgotten that I’d been trying to get her to pin down favorites, she did it herself.

She’s also getting quite good with letters. She identifies them all by name, and for a handful she knows their sounds reliably. And for a select couple, she can say which words begin with those letters. G, and M, and sometimes D. Whenever there’s the opportunity, I quiz her on what letters certain words start with, or what words certain letters might start; and she’s always very proud of herself for getting one right.

Just before I put her down to sleep, she’s usually so tired that it’s easy for her to break into a crying fit. Today was no different, but I couldn’t tell what it was that set her off this time. So I just hugged her until she had enough air to talk, and then asked her what happened. “Mr. McGregor scared you!” She’s largely eradicated “you” from references to herself at this point, unless she’s particularly distraught, so in this case I knew that Mr. McGregor had been quite a villain. But since it had been at least an hour since we’d discussed anything about The Tale of Peter Rabbit, it appears that she’s developed some kind of empathy for Peter, and it has stuck with her that there is a difference between “good guy” and “bad guy” and that bad guys are scary. I hope to be able to talk her out of being scared of her imagination, though: to date, we’ve been mercifully free of fear when it comes to the dark, the drain, and other classics. Just blenders and doctors scare her. And also, maybe I need to re-narrate the story for her, so that she can see that it is really Peter who is the villain, and Mr. McGregor is the victim.

Time to go clean the bathrooms. They’re all smeared with hand soap, because that’s been the new fun game while I’m not looking recently.