Smart cookie

(Photo left over from November -- I know the pictures are the real reason the grandparents come here, but I don't have a new one.)

We've been wishing B would learn to read. M & I both love to read, and hope to pass that on to B. And frankly, life would be a lot easier if B could read for, say, ten minutes? Enough time for me to maybe wash the dishes or, god forbid, have a moment of quiet time in the house. But he has shown very little interest, and we haven't been pushing it.

Then last night, two things happened that astonished me: first, he looked at my sweatshirt and said "Mommy, that blue shirt you're wearing says the same thing as that gray shirt you were wearing yesterday." Whoa. He was right! He didn't actually know what it said, but he totally recognized it. (In case you're wondering, it said 'Kansas.' Rock chalk Jayhawk!)

Then just a few minutes later, M was reading him his bedtime stories. He was trying to show B how when you spell a word, you have to name all the letters in order. He has a habit of picking random letters off a page of the newspaper, yelling them out, and asking what it spells -- think "Hey Mommy! What does W-Y-H-F-R-L-M spell?" Then he gets pissed off when I either say the nonsense it spells ("wifferlim," in this case), or tell him it doesn't spell anything. So anyway, M was asking him to name the letters in a word. B got cranky and starting whining "But I don't WANT to spell that word. Just READ, Daddy!" M said "OK, I just thought you might want to know how to spell 'boy' since you are a boy." B replied "Duh Daddy. It's b-o-y."

I think he can secretly read and is hiding it from us. Crafty little devil.

Totally unrelated, random thing that made me laugh yesterday: We were driving back from my parents' house & passed a hay field. B yelled out "Hey, look at all those big huge clunks of hay in that field!" Some people call them 'bales.'