Silas at 3: the end of infancy and toddlerhood

Stats: 36.5 inches, 30 pounds.  Rather on the short side; guess my genes kicked in.

"In conclusion, age three is a land of contrasts."

No seriously, it is. The phrase "mental whiplash" comes to mind.  We have a child who, on the one hand, can:
-accurately discuss the function of the kidneys, blood, immune system, etc.
-ask genuinely insightful questions about the orbits of planets
-enjoy a 2 hour classical music concert
-play chess for an hour (by all the actual rules, with some degree of strategy if not much)
-bike for 2 miles straight
-understands and cares about labor protests and the anti-Trump resistance
-and build a (crude but obvious) airplane out of Lego from scratch, BUT:

-refuses to eat almost any kind of vegetable (as long as his parents are present; others sometimes have better results), simply because he knows people want him to
-has accidents a couple times a week because he insists on not using the toilet if anybody has suggested to him that he ought to, just to prove them wrong (this is his ONLY source of accidents)
-is OBSESSED with getting party favors at birthday parties (far more than any actual celebration of the birthday child) and very nearly had a meltdown at the one party at which he did not receive any favor
-has enormous difficulty getting ready to leave the house to go anywhere, EVEN to go to the trampoline world with his best friend (come ON kid)
-is absolutely determined to spend his weekly spending dollar (he is not allowed to spend his saving or giving dollar) on whatever he can afford that's cheap, because we made the mistake of advising him not to..

You get the idea. Logical reasoning skills, a long attention span and good manners do NOT necessarily apply to all realms of life.  Independence and lack of coercion are still a top priority for Silas, and he makes that known, even at a very high cost to himself.

The older he gets, the more obvious it is that he has asynchronies in his development.  I imagine that all children have asynchronies to at least some degree - I mean, we all have our strengths and weaknesses, don't we? But it's actually been something I've struggled with at times.  I have to be careful to adjust my expectations appropriately within different realms.  That takes patience, which I am always, always, always going to be learning.

Silas has known virtually all the letters for more than a year, and he knows what sounds they make.  He can sound out very short words much better than he used to be able to, and now he generally reads the letters/sounds in the correct order.  He can now identify initial sounds most of the time (and pick the correct letter with which to start writing a word), he can parse/clap syllables, and he is a prodigious rhymer, coming up with nonsense rhymes for anything, even long phrases.  (He responds to about 15% of what I say each day with nonsense rhymes, which... gets old.) He can now write many letters, too, and has written some very simple words of his own volition. He still hasn't been interested in learning lower case letters, though, so reading books just isn't appealing. Much better luck with road signs, license plates, etc.

In terms of spoken language, I don't even know what to say about him, really.  He still over-regularizes verbs (but gets mad if we over-regularize, explaining that we are doing it wrong), and sometimes he gets lost in complicated grammatical mazes when he's trying to say something specific, but overall, his language use is off the charts. We often find ourselves raising our eyebrows at $10 vocabulary words he uses ("where did he get THAT one?", and I always tell myself I'll write them down, but then I forget.  We also tell ourselves we'll record some of the more remarkable things he says, but we forget to do that too.  I do have a few recordings of everyday conversation for posterity. His pronunciation still sounds pretty young.  He doesn't pronounce "L" at all, and when I gently pointed this out one day by repeating back to him the way he pronounces the word "alive" ("awive"), he actually hid in shame and started to cry, the poor child, so you can bet I won't be trying that again.  "CH" is pronounced as "TS", "TH" is pronounced as "F", initial Rs are often dropped, "IH" sounds like "EH", and very complicated words trip him up. It takes him 10 tries to say "Schiaparelli" every time ("Skapiwehwa").

His number sense is dramatically less developed than his language and literacy skills. He can count to 20 although he still sometimes messes up the order of the high teens.  He can enumerate objects, up to 15 I'd say, but he makes mistakes maybe 10-20% of the time when he gets distracted and counts an object twice or skips one.  He can do addition and subtraction problems with numbers ~5 and under (he uses his hands, usually), and he has a very firm grasp of the meaning of zero, but really doesn't seem to understand the deeper meaning of larger numbers. This is despite the fact that he will answer "how many?" and "give me ___" questions appropriately and correctly. He also uses "hundreds" and "millions" colloquially.  I did not expect there to be such a HUGE lag between learning to enumerate and count in a functional way (which was 6 months ago) and truly understanding the meaning of larger numbers.  A result of this confusion is that despite being told approximately a billion times, he still has absolutely no idea what the written number "10" means.  He reports "a one next to a zero".  I find this fascinating, particularly since he has a strong ability to string letters together.

Overall, in terms of intellectual development, it's safe to say he's very bright.  I administered an early childhood screen to him in the most formal way I could without paying a fortune, mostly because I wanted a benchmark so I could figure out if I was being whiny and demanding about lack of challenges at school or whether it was a legitimate issue (more on this below), and he scored around a mental age of 4.5, but that was actually the ceiling of the test, so who knows. Very recently (more on this too) he drew a person which I scored somewhat casually, although conservatively, using the Goodenough Draw-A-Person criteria, which resulted in a similar mental age, 4.75-5.  His forward digit span of 5 suggests the same thing.  So far, we have not discussed this information with any of his teachers, and I'm not sure I'm going to.  I find myself at a bit of a mental crossroads regarding the future of his education.  On the one hand, I desperately want him to have an unhurried, non-helicoptered childhood, and I don't want him to learn inadvertently that being clever is the point of life.  To this end, we have been very cautious to praise effort far more than outcome and avoid the ubiquitous "good job".  If we tell Silas he's smart, it's always separated from any particular action, and we also tell him that he's kind and empathetic and strong and creative too. I feel pretty confident that he doesn't perceive any of the "educational" stuff we do at home as intended to make him smarter.  It's just fun stuff.

On the other hand, I do think it's a mistake to under-challenge children, especially since it can result in a child who is very inexperienced at struggling and failing and trying again, or who learns that they always accomplish everything in school easily, or more easily than others.  I also don't want Silas to be bored.  Even so, in some ways it's much too early to be concerned about his education, since he's obviously getting a heavy dose of enrichment at home (and plenty of opportunities to try hard things) and there is no need for him to acquire any particular academic skills at age 3! He has plenty of social and emotional things to work on at school!  However, he has recently reported that none of the work in the Lilac room is hard, and his December report card indicated that he has already mastered every item on the toddler curriculum except properly blowing his nose (yeah, because he picks it instead...).  After an excruciatingly long, vague and tedious bunch of email conversations with the school, he is finally visiting a Primary classroom with work more appropriate for his "areas of active development" as Brian put it in teacher-speak.  We're hoping this will be a positive thing.  Continuing to spend many hours a day in an environment full of materials he has already mastered might not be such a great idea.  We are also hoping to get him some interaction with older children.  Last year he was the youngest in his class, and although he was also the most verbal, he had PLENTY to learn from observing the older children.  This year, he's among the oldest children, and he's gotten frustrated at dealing with pre-verbal toddlers who grab things without asking and don't respond to polite requests.  It's valuable to learn to be with small children, but I think he might benefit even more right now from being with the 3-6 year old group in which almost all the children will be able to communicate with him effectively.

(Addendum: At our parent-teacher conference [Silas age 3.25], Silas’s teachers used a variety of hushed superlatives to describe Silas’s language and cognitive skills, i.e. waving their hands high above their heads to demonstrated how far ahead he is, and conveyed that they feel rather sheepish that they don’t have materials in the classroom that are more appropriate for his level.  His visits to the Primary classroom seem to be going well, and have certainly resulted in startling leaps in development especially in literacy. Back in the Lilac room, he gets to play with his best friend Ezra, and he also gets to be a leader.  His teachers said several times that he is the clear leader in the classroom, and all of the children look up to him.  He has been teaching the younger children how to do things, and quite nicely and patiently too.  For example, one of the youngest children apparently idolizes him, and also LOVES to drink orange juice but is unable to handle the juice-squeezing work on his own.  Silas makes the juice and then splits it between them as the younger child watches on in amazement. Silas has also been volunteering to help clean up after the little ones. We’re hoping that this combination of “little fish in a big pond” and “big fish in a little pond” will continue to be good for the rest of the year.)

Emotionally, Silas continues to be an intense, observant, guarded, proud and extremely stubborn child. He is not particularly affectionate, although it would be a serious mistake to say that he is uncaring.  He's just deeply reserved. His affection usually comes out at prescribed times - he gives warm goodbye hugs and kisses, but he almost never gives hugs at "random" times.  He is still extremely sensitive to any changes in our behavior. If somebody other than Brian picks him up, or somebody other than me drops him off, or if one of us is absent at bedtime, it seems to make him anxious. He needs a great deal of advance warning about changes like this, but we often find ourselves falling short in this regard because he has virtually no trouble with traveling, new places, or adapting to unorthodox or even chaotic schedules as long as both parents are present.  I think that separating from us (at school and even at bedtime, although we're at most 10 feet away and he ends up in our bed half the time anyway) is still a Very Big Deal from him.  If it doesn't happen exactly as he expects, he can be terribly unsettled.

He still has meltdowns, averaging about once every ten days.  They can be quite intense; he may cry for 45 minutes.  Unfortunately, if it becomes necessary to pick him up when he's having a meltdown, much of the time he will try to hit us.  He is certainly aware that this is unacceptable, but doesn't seem to be able to control himself yet.  However, in contrast to 6 months ago, he now often apologizes.  It's still very hard for him, and sometimes requires some gentle prompting, but he does it.  So that's progress.  Unfortunately, last week at school, Silas tried to hit one of his teachers when she insisted that he take a nap.  As far as we are aware, that's the only time he's ever been aggressive with anybody other than us.  It happened after he visited the Purple Room for the first time (where, incidentally, napping is somewhat less strictly observed), and he seemed to be struggling mightily with whether he still belonged in his old class.  It seems like the same sort of thing we've observed at home if somebody other than Brian picks him up from school.  It's a shame that it's SO hard to untangle all the deep and complicated feelings.

One source of complicated feelings seems to be gender.  For a very long time now, Silas has been fascinated by the idea of pregnancy, and when we finally told him definitively, a few months ago, that people with male bodies cannot grow babies, he was very upset.  For quite a long time he said that he wanted to grow up to be a Mama, and we explained that sometimes, children who are born with boy bodies are sure they are girls inside, and when they grow up, they might decide to be a woman with the help of a doctor.  But even so, they will not be able to grow a baby.  I think it was a bitter pill for him to swallow, and he was not at all reassured by our insistence that a Papa has a very important role to play in growing a baby, but he seems to be moving on a little bit (and has switched to suggesting frequently that we have another baby instead). At times he has told us very clearly that he is OK with being a boy, and OK with growing into a man (though he definitely does not want a beard).  At other times he's expressed some sadness that he doesn't get to pick his anatomy, or said that he wants to be a girl.  It's easy to get one's heart in one's throat with this kind of thing ("Oh god, the world will be so cruel") but there's nothing to be done except to wait and let him wade through the muck that is our culture.  At the moment, he seems blissfully free of silly gendered rules.  This morning at the dentist* he chose a Thomas the Tank Engine sticker and a pink Ariel toothbrush. He loves purple and red.  He asked for (and received) a dress, and seems to enjoy its twirly aspects, but more often chooses vehicle-related clothing or has no preference.

*Just to brag a little, the hygienist told him he should come back and demonstrate to the older kids how to behave.

He has formed a real friendship with a little boy named Ezra, from school.  It's exceedingly fortunate for us that Ezra's parents are among our favorite people here, so we all enjoy getting together.  They're a real comedy duo together - if one kid starts doing something goofy, the other has to join in.  They are inseparable on the playground at school.  They hold hands and hug and argue over who gets to roll down the hill first and cute kid stuff like that.  I'm so happy that he has a friend.

A week or two before his third birthday, Silas decided to potty train.  Prior to this, he had made it abundantly clear that he was not interested in using the toilet or potty, and he was unmoved by the promise of candy or toys.  We seemed to have no influence whatsoever.  But after just a single visit to a Primary classroom, he announced to his teachers that he was done with diapers and came home without one.  Very unfortunately for all involved, for the first 4 days of diaperlessness, he also refused to enter the bathroom which obviously prevented him from having even the tiniest bit of success with the toilet.  He was furious about his accidents, too, and it was a TERRIBLE few days.  (One day at school he held it for the entire day, and the next day he wet 5 pairs of pants...) At some point, though, we realized he was trying to give up peeing FOREVER, and we addressed his rather unfortunate plan with a diagram of the kidneys and bladder and a little lesson on urine production.  We also had to take turns leaving the house to do fun activities without him, explaining that if he was unwilling to use the toilet, that meant he was planning to pee on the floor, which was an unacceptable plan for public spaces.  After missing a trip to the cafe and a trip to the library and almost missing a trip to the beloved Imagine Playspace (Land of the Cozy Coupe), he hopped on the toilet and was pretty much potty trained from that point on.  We still have trouble now and then due to his extreme stubbornness (see above), but he's had just two accidents at school since the beginning and is dry all night too.  Phew.

He's now watched his first and only movie:  WALL-E.  It was intense - he cried from overwhelm 3 times and we had to take breaks - but he loved it and it's been a very fertile source of imaginary play over the last few months.

Favorite activities:
-Building with Lego.  Mostly he builds kooky robots on wheels, which I love.
-Building with Magnatiles. We all LOVE Magnatiles; they're the perfect toy.  He loves making tall towers, building triangular prisms on top of his Magnatile car bases, and making garages.
-Playing with his kinetic sand.  His miniature CAT construction vehicles are great for this.
-Requesting endless performances of dramatic scenarios he dreams up (he gives us lines and stage directions) using cars, dolls, etc. The only thing that taxes my patience more is whining...
-Biking, although recently the sidewalks have been too snowy.
-Baking - he's quite a good helper at this point.  I opine that through baking you can teach math and measurement, chemistry, reading, cell biology, botany, history, sensory neuroscience, physics, aesthetics, anthropology, and all kinds of stuff about other cultures.  Plus it's a practical skill that requires patience and executive function and it results in a snack.  What could be better?  The only downside is all the stuff you have to wash.
-Horsing around on our bed.  He cackles like a wicked witch, especially since during the winter he's usually got some degree of a cough.  Also loves to be tickled, which I can't account for since I hate it!
-Reading.  Recent big hits include almost everything by Dr. Seuss, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Amazing Animal Senses, a pop-up book about outer space and rockets, and hundreds of others.  We usually take out 10-15 new ones every other week from the public library. He's still very sensitive to stories about mean people - doesn't want to hear about anybody who treats others badly.
-Visiting Winthrop Beach, our local outdoor haunt.  Snails, rocks, wind, sand, seaweed, crabs, and the peace of the ocean, which he very much feels.  We also almost always bring our camping stove to make cocoa :)
-Games.  He's learning chess, which has been really exciting especially for Brian.  He learned how all the pieces moved after his first 2 games, although he still gets the knights wrong sometimes.  He understands protecting and threatening and can do those things we draw his attention to specific situations, but obviously it's a major challenge to "keep an eye" on everything going on in chess and he certainly doesn't have a coherent overall strategy.  Sometimes he actually notices an issue on his own and makes an appropriate strategic move. His greatest joy is capturing pieces and at least at the moment he seems to enjoy the process so much that he doesn't really care if his pieces get captured in return.  He's having so much fun with it, and we're pretty impressed!  He also loves to play Go Fish, and 3 different variations on Memory/Concentration:  The Secret Door (which is the clear family favorite), Pengoloo, and Animal Families. He also likes Max, a cooperative strategy game. He seems to have ditched puzzles and is now uninterested.

Few other assorted milestones:
-Can dress himself completely but is almost guaranteed to have either his shirt or pants backwards and one of his socks upside-down.  He INSISTS he does this on purpose and refuses to switch them.
-Can crudely cut out a shape with scissors
-Last time I asked him to make a block tower it was 14 high
-Despite having known many colors (consistently and correctly) for more than a year, he still persistently calls white yellow and vice versa, even immediately after correction (i.e. he's stubborn)


Some recent questions:
"How do your arms work when you think about moving your arms?"
"Why does the earth spin if nothing makes it spin?"
"How can tape be sticky?"
"How do people make thread?"
"Is light a gas because I can't hold onto it?"
"Why does bread have holes in it?"
"Why is Ezra allergic to peanuts and why am I not allergic to peanuts?"

He's astonishingly good at remembering our explanations and making further hypotheses based on what we tell him. With two scientist parents, it's not surprising he's interested in this stuff since we talk about it all the time, but he really seems to love thinking about it!

An exciting first:  Silas attended my most recent orchestra concert.  Until now he's attended the dress rehearsal with the other babies and toddlers, but this time we told him that if he took a late nap, he could stay up late and go to the real concert.  He did indeed take a nice nap, and then he got all dressed up for his big night.  He behaved himself PERFECTLY, was admired by hundreds of elderly concertgoers, got treats at a reception afterward, and best of all, he was thrilled by the music.  The Firebird Suite was the last thing on the program and Silas was absolutely enthralled.  Hooray!  He has said on at least 5 occasions that he would like to play the violin.  I don't doubt that he has the attention span and cognitive ability right now, but I don't think his fine motor skills are anywhere near refined enough to start.  We told him maybe next year.

And finally, a breakthrough.  Silas has basically refused to draw since he was about a year old. At times he's seemed anxious and frustrated that he couldn't draw like he wanted to, and at other times he just seemed disinterested, and either way I was a bit baffled, but there wasn't anything to be done about it.  He also refused to write anything, but that was less remarkable given that he's 3.  But just recently, that all changed.  He went to a birthday party for one of his friends, and while he was there he sat next to her as she doodled.  She was narrating her drawings, saying "Here's an airplane... Here's a cloud..." and Silas seemed to have an epiphany.  A few days later he suddenly picked up a crayon (still with his fist - he doesn't know how to hold it right) and drew a sun.  Within an hour or two he'd drawn 2 people (nice stick figures, with some clothes and features too), a family of suns, written his own name and "MAMA", written a series of letters and numbers I had no idea he was capable of writing, and made a diagram of the solar system with Brian.  A few days later he asked to write a letter to Grandma and wrote the whole thing in his own hand (very legible letters, although his sizing/spacing was rather confusing) although we told him how to spell everything.It was a rather shocking transformation!  I'm so excited, though - now we can make all kinds of drawings of things we're learning about!  And collaborative art!  Wheeeee!

I think this will likely be my last Growing Silas update, at least in its internet form.  Silas clearly remembers pretty much everything that's happened to him since last March (which is right around when his speech became fully grammatical at all times, probably not coincidentally), and likely farther, though older events are harder to place. (Almost every day he says something like "Remember that time I slid down the stairs with Uncle Niels at Christmas?" "Remember that time when Anissa came over and we played with her toy pager on the porch?" That one was last April.)  Along with this more continuous sense of time and self, he has developed the need for privacy at times, and it no longer seems right to spill the details.  I think I'll probably collate all of my major "updates" and print them out and add them to the photo album I have made for him of birth through age 3.

There are big things on the horizon for Silas.  In 6 months, a move to Ithaca, to our new house (which will have a secret hidey hole for him). He'll start at the same Montessori school my sister attended.  We've started teaching him some safety-related stuff in preparation for having more independence, especially once we're out of the city and he'll have much more space to roam.  (He knows his address, age, birthday and his full name, but we haven't talked about calling 911 or other emergency plans.)  Farewell, infancy and toddlerhood.  Hello, childhood!

Silas's Summer

Silas has had a wonderful summer.  He's been at home with Brian, who has done a marvelous job of giving him an idyllic summer experience.  Brian has taken him on an outing virtually every day, while also taking care of quite a bit of housework and accomplishing several personal goals. Silas has really thrived.  I continued to work, although I had a week of vacation and I typically worked from 7:45-3:45 to maximize my quality time at home.  We had about 4.5 good hours each afternoon.  I often wrote Silas letters in the morning before I left for work, and he and Brian called me on the phone whenever Silas missed me.  

Some of the things that Brian and Silas did without me: Imagine Playspace, Launch (the trampoline world), Harvard Museum of Natural History, Winthrop Beach, and Walden Pond.  And of course, countless playground and neighborhood adventures.  One of Brian's triumphs of the summer was convincing Silas that if he practiced, he could put on his own shoes and get ready to go on his own - and of course, now he can, and he's very proud to be able to put on any shoes without help.  This has made a big difference in getting ready to go places!  Silas doesn't have to "submit" to our help with anything any more.

Silas has had a huge amount of exercise, including hiking, biking, trampolining at Launch, swimming (either running through fountains or, more recently, actually beginning to kick and paddle withs upport), and climbing on the playground.  Oh, and he's added climbing trees to his repertoire!  Gross motor improvements are quite incremental these days, but Silas is certainly becoming stronger and more agile.  He can stand on one foot for several seconds, climb all sorts of rope ladders, swing from bars - all that great kid stuff.  And he's now capable of biking for several miles; he has great endurance.  Both Brian and I feel good about meeting our physical activity goals for the summer.  In addition to all the exercise we did with Silas, each of us managed our own programs of yoga/running/pushups/HIIT/etc. (and my triathlon!), and we're pleased to have set that example.

Silas has grown a lot socially this summer.  He attended a couple Kids Yoga classes, and contrary to our disastrous experiences with museum and library story times in the past, he actually participated and enjoyed it.  He now approaches children on the playground confidently and introduces himself, organizes games with them ("Let's play firefighters, and let's pretend that there's a fire over there and we have a hose"), and is generally a very good playmate.  No adult interference required, and we've NEVER seen him treat another child roughly.  It's been great fun to watch him play with the neighborhood kids. Unfortunately (at least from the perspective of his return to school in a few weeks) he still completely ignores children his own age.  Just last week we were on the playground with one of his future classmates, and Silas tried his best to get her to play ball with him, but she either didn't understand the game or got distracted, and he gave up and headed over to chat with the 4 year olds.  Hopefully this won't be a big problem during the school year...

Speaking of yoga, he seems to have a special fascination with it.  He LOVES watching yoga videos with me, and although he finds it difficult to mimic poses by looking at the video, he's excellent at matching me.  He's gone through several rather challenging 20-minute videos with me, and I also found a nice kids' yoga video for him.  I think this is very positive, especially since he's really taking the deep breathing suggestions to heart.  He hates to hear that stuff from us (I think it must come with a whiff of "just calm down", which of course he hates), but he has really listened to the yoga instructor.

He's recently fallen in love with board games.  The first time he took them out of the closet, Brian was in the shower and I was working and he was just keeping himself occupied.  He asked me to set up the game, and I was hesitant, expecting he wouldn't really be able to play by the rules.  And the first time we played, he actually did a fair bit of cheating (placing the die the way he wanted it, etc.) but I'm glad I persisted because by the second time around, he was really playing!  "Max" (a cooperative strategy game) and "The Secret Door" are his games right now, and they're great.  "The Secret Door" is basically a souped-up/storified version of Memory, and he's surprisingly good at remember where the objects are, even though there are 12 pairs.  Several times he's remembered locations I myself have forgotten! I think we'll have to get him some new ones soon.

One of Silas's favorite games is something we made up this summer called "Missions".  Mostly we play it at the park or playground.  We tell him, "Your mission is to run to that bench, twirl around, count to 5, run to that rock, and then pick a piece of grass and bring it back to me".  He adores this game, far more than I would ever have thought possible, and is BURSTING with pride when he correctly executes all the steps.  He also likes to assign us missions, which is hilarious.  He consistently remembers 4 different elements, but starts forgetting pieces or going out of order if I give him 5 tasks.  

Although Silas's speech has been fully grammatical and quite complex since ~early spring, there have been some improvements.  He uses a lot of colloquialisms now, inserting "I guess" and "actually" and "probably" in the appropriate spots.  I've also noticed better use of subjunctive mood.  Mostly, though, the improvements are more difficult to pinpoint, and amount to "he sounds much more like an adult", i.e. his speech patterns are more sophisticated.  He still over-regularizes some verbs, and it's not uncommon for him to stumble a few times over very complex sentence structures before getting it right.  And he can't pronounce "L" at all, so he's unmistakably a two-year-old!  He does sound a LOT younger when he gets flustered, or when he's speaking to strangers (which presumably makes him flustered).  It can take him an hour or so to start speaking normally to new people - but that's down from a full 24 hours a few months ago!  I think that has more to do with his social confidence than anything.

Lately Silas has been very fond of typing on my computer, and often he'll type a bunch of "M"s and tell me it says Mama, or a bunch of "S"s and tell me it says Silas.  He can sound out short simple words, same as quite a few months ago.  Of course we haven't pushed it, although he is DELIGHTED when he "decodes" a word - you should see him beam.  He's also really, really into rhyming all of a sudden.  For example, I'll say "let's find your truck" and he'll beam and say "no, I think we should find the GLUCK! HAHAHAHA".  Sometimes it's actually a pain and gets in the way of conversation, but at least he's having fun. He's made larger strides when it comes to counting; he now understands enumeration and can correctly enumerate up to 10 objects, but only if he's really paying attention.  (He's counted to 20 for some time, but I think counting to 20 and enumerating at the same time is too much - he always gets it wrong.)  If he gets distracted he'll count things twice or skip items.  He seems to be teetering on the edge of understanding what all the number words really *mean*.  Some days he seems to really understand, and other days he's clearly a clear believer in "one, two, many".  He also seems to be teetering on an understanding of "first" and "last".  I find it fascinating that numeracy, and the concepts of first/last and sequential order, are so much harder for him (and, I gather, nearly all children) to grasp than other concepts that seem so related.  For example, Silas has had a very firm grasp, for quite a while now, on many concepts of relative relationships (bigger, biggest, all of the prepositions, task order), colors, shapes, complex puzzles, same/different, and several other things that, to my adult mind, seem about as challenging as numeracy.  I guess not!

Earlier in the summer we introduced Silas to a game called Thinkrolls, which is a series of logic puzzles requiring the player to think ahead 3-4 steps before executing any of them.  After I played with him for the first 10-15 minutes (during which he fell into every single trap on account of not thinking ahead) he really took off, solving puzzles that I was *sure* would be much too complicated for him.  He finished all of the "easy" levels himself and got half way through the "hard" levels before they were just too complicated for him to reason out.  It was really cool to see him problem solve!

Along with the puzzles, he's slowly but surely become much more interested in scientific explanations.  I mean, some of this is probably our influence (with two scientist parents he can't escape, really) but it's been really exciting to see him start to formulate REAL questions and theories all by himself.  For example, a few weeks ago he asked why his hand seems to stick to the drain in the bathtub as all the water is draining out.  We asked him what he thought, and he said that he though the molecules in the water were causing his hand to become sticky to metal.  Good guess!  He has also been asking a lot of really great "why" questions - genuinely thoughtful ones about how the world works.  We've talked about so many things - electricity, heat, digestion, how various things are manufactured, farming... He's become quite concerned about turning off electric devices so we don't use up too much electricity, since we explained that power plants that make electricity often release bad gasses into the air. (After that he asked me to explain what gasses were.  It's HARD!  Should have let Brian field that one.)  He's also VERY concerned about litter and picks up trash wherever he goes, since we've been talking about taking care of the earth so much.  So many great conversations lately.

We had a borrowed microscope at home this summer, and we collected water samples from several ponds, rivers and oceans, and it's been great fun for all of us to observe microorganisms.  At first I think Silas was quite unclear about what the microscope was doing and what all those creatures on the screen were, but now he gives excellent explanations, telling us that there are tiny bacteria and microorganisms living in water and on our bodies, and they are so small we cannot see them but if we use a microscope they can look big and we can observe them.  He even did an experiment with Uncle Niels, in which he cultured the bacteria on his hands, mouth, feet and hair under a few different conditions.  He did a great job explaining to me that the bacteria were coming off his body and going into the food in the plate, where they could grow until there were enough that we could see them.

All in all, it seems like we have arrived in a new "era" of logic and reason, in which we can explain to him how things work, and have it really stick.  This was particularly evident after we took him on his Very Big Special Treat of the summer, a trip to Mt. Washington to ride the antique steam train up Mt. Washington.  Of course he was utterly thrilled with the experience (which also included a hike to a waterfall, Grandma Susie and Grandpa Dick, a B&B with a pool and playset, a pancake parlor, etc.), and the train itself was the main attraction.  We explained to him how the cog mechanism helps the train avoid slipping down the mountain, and several days later he was able to explain the whole thing to Aunt Julia, logic entirely intact.  Cool!

Artistically, modest changes - certainly his art is more complex and geometric (lots of parallel lines and simple patterns), but he continues to be frustrated by his lack of fine motor control.  With great effort he can now use safety scissors, but his favorite art activity continues to be either coloring in pictures of cars and trains (which he does with great care) or painting boxes.  Still INSISTS he cannot draw a person and absolutely refuses to try.  He loves to listen to music, and basically memorized an entire album of Dinosaur Train songs after one listening (he sings them to himself during quiet time, ad nauseum).  He still loves to listen to orchestral music.  (A funny story:  I let him listen to the Classical Kids recording of Mozart's Magic Fantasy, which is a kids' version of the Magic Flute.  I had no idea he was playing such close attention, but a week later we passed a tiny figurehead above a storefront and he told me he'd seen a queen and that we should run away.  Confused, I had to ask several questions before I figured out that he now thinks all queens are mean and evil and attack people in the dark, just like the Queen of the Night.)  At home he often asks us to "be in an orchestra" with him, in which he plays the drum, glockenspiel or recorder and we pick up our violins, guitar or some of his little instruments.  He has asked to play the violin probably 10 times over the last 6 months, and we're thinking of getting him a 1/16th size violin for his third birthday.  However, he clearly lacks the motor skills to play at this stage.  

We went up to Brightwater for a little over a week in July, with some friends, and although the trip started out really rough with various house problems (fridge breakdown, water main burst, mouse infestation) we ended up having a terrific time.  Silas and his friend M played very well together (and also competed quite a bit, not surprisingly), and we all did some wonderful boating, hiking, relaxing, beachcombing, swimming, and so on.  We also took some trips into town for ice cream. We grown ups had some glorious hours to talk amongst ourselves during which the kids were off playing in the woods on their own, making up sagas.  I think we made the most of the woods and the cabin and the ocean and the general beauty and peace there.  For me, the highlight was taking Silas up into my childhood treehouse (about 8 feet off the ground), and hearing him say, utterly unprompted by me, "You can really BREATHE up here" as he gazed peacefully over the ocean.  I think he's getting it :)

Let's see, summer miscellany:  we took a road trip to Dinosaur State Park in CT to visit friends with a newborn and see dinosaur footprints.  Mark came to visit for several days and he and Brian took Silas sailing, canoeing and we all went to the beach.  My second cousin Emilie visited also, only briefly, but she'll be back before Labor Day.  Grandma Susie, Grandpa Dick, Aunt Hannah and GG visited for July 4th, coinciding perfectly with Silas's ONLY difficult days of the entire summer.  (He was so impossible and grouchy and miserable that he made both of us miss most of the 4th of July festivities, including the fireworks I'd meticulously planned for us to attend - AND he was mean about it.  So glad that was over quickly.) We attended a few birthday parties.  I played a Longwood Symphony concert in the Hatch Shell (just this week) and Silas stayed up until 10:00 for the first time to attend.  He had a GREAT time - think wild dancing on the lawn with his friends - and he was extremely well behaved even late at night when the bus home never came and we had to stop at H Mart for provisions.  

I saved the most boring for last, apparently:  Silas has started dropping his nap occasionally.  We do "quiet time" for about an hour around 1 PM, and usually he falls asleep after 20-30 minutes, but sometimes he just sings to himself (he has memorized the entire "Jurassic Jams" album from Dinosaur Train)  and makes up stories or reads to himself the whole time.  If that happens he's inevitably falling asleep at the table by dinner time, but in sharp contrast to a few months ago, he doesn't totally fall apart and become a ball of rage.  Just sleepy.  And then he'll go to bed at 7:30 and sleep for 11.5 hours, which is kinda neat.  

Overall, Brian and I often remark that we got really, really lucky with Silas.  He's such a thoroughly good person, almost startlingly so at times, so kind and caring and full of goodwill, but he's also thoroughly himself, opinionated and independent and stubborn and reserved.  Such a lovely and gentle yet strong person.  Of course I'm biased, but I think he'll be good for the world.

Now if only he'd use the darn potty... 

Silas, 2.5

Silas is just a little bit shy of two-and-a-half years old.  He weights something like 26 or 27 pounds, and although he still has a bit of a toddler pot-belly, his proportions look much more like those of an older child now - his arms and legs are stretching out.  He's quite thin and muscly.

He's much more agile and sure-footed than he was six months ago, balancing easily on one foot for brief periods and climbing (and even running) over very rough terrain.  He's still quite astonishingly graceful on his scooter, but he's riding it much less than before because we bought him a balance bike which has become a new obsession.  It only took him 4 days (maybe a cumulative one or two hours) to go from trudging along to gliding around with his feet up, zooming ahead - and asking me for a bike with pedals.  There aren't any that he could realistically ride with such short legs - they may be stretching out, but they aren't long enough for even the smallest pedal bike.  So that will have to wait.

Despite his grace and coordination and excellent balance, his hand-eye coordination is actually pretty bad and he really can't catch a ball yet.

A few days ago I got stuck in a traffic jam with Silas in the car, and we had a 25-minute conversation during which he made only one single grammatical error ("Why there's a red light?" instead of "Why is there a red light?").  When he's relaxed, and talking to us one-on-one, his grammar is excellent, his speech is quite clear (although he still cannot pronounce a few consonants and consonant combinations), and he's very articulate.  If he's feeling grumpy or shy, he tends to mumble and garble his words, and/or trail off in the midst of a thought.  When he's feeling a bit wild, he stops enunciating properly and it can be hard to understand him. He barely speaks at all to unfamiliar guests, even if they ask him questions, remaining quiet and wide-eyed for hours before he gets comfortable.  This makes it very difficult for visitors to get a sense of who he really is, and sometimes I worry that it makes me look like a bit of a fibber!

I always regret not writing down examples of things that he says, so I resolved to write something down this time.  At the moment he and Brian are playing with trains, and I've just asked him if he wants to eat more oatmeal, or if I should put it away.  He says, "No, you should not put my oatmeal away because I will finish it in just a minute."  Then he put all of his toy train cars in a single long train, and when Brian remarked on this, he said "Yeah, we'll have to buy some more toy trains at the store.  Some more LOTS of trains at the store, to make my train even longer!"  So, as you can see, his grammar is good but not always 100% perfect.  He has an enormous vocabulary - for example, this morning he told me a cardboard barn was "too unstable".  Also told me he heard "mysterious music" and that his train was "enormous". He often uses precise terminology.  This morning, when talking about which playground we'd go to, he asked, "You mean, the one with the open car where you can turn the steering wheel?"  (No, I meant the one with the huge sandbox and water wheel.)  And when we gave him a lemonade popsicle after lunch and asked what it tasted like, he said "kind of juicy and orangey".  One last thing:  while I was in the bathroom, he came in and told me: "I found a tiny little thingy on my toe."  I asked him if that was OK, and he said "Yes.  I kicked it under the wall [baseboard] so we don't have to do anything now."  Haha.

[A few days later, I'm sitting on the couch while Brian and Silas eat lunch, writing down Silas's side of the conversation as he says it.]

"Chugga chugga,that's what the train book says.  Chugging happily along.  That book is in Grandma Marsha's apartment.

Papa told me that he was going to work today.
Papa, if grownups are fighting, the police will come and say "what's wrong with you guys"?
Papa, can I have some milk?
Mama, I said to Papa that I want some juice, please.
Hey, I'm a doctor sometimes.
Yeah I give you a checkup to help you get better and well.
I help Harriet sometimes.  Actually I help lots of cats.
This is cold milk.  It has ice in it.
It came from the refrigerator.
I have to take off my shirt and my pants because they are a little bit soaky because I spilled my milk."

Silas is often extremely mannerly, caring and polite with us.  He often asks us how our days are going, and carefully listens to the answer.  If we look unhappy he asks why.  These days he usually declines offers with "no thank you".  When asking for something, he usually says "Could you ....." and sometimes adds "please".  He thanks us for cooking dinner and preparing him food at other times.  Most of the time he is extremely pleasant to be around.  After the constant tumultuous, fiery oppositionalism of three months ago, he seems to have found his peace with the need for cooperation within the family.  We are often surprised by how cooperative he is these days, honoring agreements and timers (usually!), and coming along when asked, even if that's not what he really wants.  We're very proud of how well he's taking care of his own emotions, too.  Sometimes, when frustrated, he asks for some time to be alone, and then emerges refreshed and ready to play.  He gets over embarrassments much more quickly than he used to, although he is still quite proud.

Surprisingly, he's quite neat and tidy, very frequently asking us to clean up spills or wash his hands.  He doesn't like to leave a mess, and often cleans up all on his own, without us asking.  I strongly suspect this is a Montessori-instilled value, and from that perspective it's not shocking or even unusual, but it still really tickles me when he insists on putting away all his toys (and does it just right, not haphazardly), or requests that I wipe up a tiny bit of oatmeal on the floor. (He often helps, too, but he can't reach many of the cleaning supplies.  We really must fix that.)

He's gotten really interested in puzzles.  He's been able to do the 20-30 piece ones we have at home for a few months (if I recall correctly, starting the day after I last wrote that he still needed help), and seems game to try just about any puzzle we show him.

He has declare don several occasions that he wants to play the violin.  We'll see if he really means it.

He's just beginning to sound out some really simple words - both in terms of reading them and writing them.  He loves to use my computer to type, slowly and painstakingly coming up with "KKKAARRRRRR" and such, with a little help.

Linguistically, Silas has become a real joker.  He loves to make up and define nonsense words, with increasing giggles.  "Mama, you are very glorbxy."  "I want two gleeglax."  "What's a gleeglax?"  "A GLEEGLAX IS A GAGA! HAHAHAHAHA!"  He makes up and conjugates alien-sounding verbs, and has even come up with very linguistically-appropriate adverbs and adjectives.  It's pretty cute except when we want to actually ask him things and he only wants to speak in gibberish, and then it can get old pretty fast!

The Boxcar Children have become steady evening companions here - Silas has heard several chapters every night for the past several weeks.  He LOVES the book (we never read enough chapters to satisfy him) and we're on our 6th straight novel.  He certainly doesn't have any trouble paying attention for 45+ minutes, but lying down is another matter.  He gets so excited that he pops out of bed to ask nearly constant questions about the plot.  It's funny to read them again as an adult.  As a kid I didn't understand the magnitude of wealth and privilege the Alden children have after the first book, and I didn't really see how lavishly their grandfather bankrolls all of their adventures such that all their independence and grit is without any real risks of any kind.  (There are always guards, kindly storekeepers, maids, relatives, and so on looking after the kids.)  Plus the sexism is appalling - but we edit that on the fly as we read to Silas.  Otherwise, the books have a lot to offer.  They have interesting, gentle mysteries that Silas likes, and the characters treat each other with genuine respect, including difficult or grumpy characters, many of whom become much kinder after being treated nicely.  Basic, New England-style "golden rule" stuff. The books are limited in perspective, but really good-hearted.

We also read through the entire My Father's Dragon series, the Catwings series, Ramona the Pest, and Winnie the Pooh.  He also likes Peter and the Wolf (with the music) and I've started to introduce the least scary/upsetting Classical Kids stories/music.  Silas loves listening to orchestra music and has really enjoyed hearing my orchestra dress rehearsals.  Lately he's also taken an interest in some other music I've played for him:  Beatles, some samba music, some reggae, etc. I'm quite surprised that he was interested in classical music first - I would have thought it would be the other way around.

One of Silas's favorite things to do is watch videos of real trains.  I think he likes the steam train videos the best (just 30 minutes or so of steam trains on tracks, coming and going), but he likes just about any train video, including toy trains.  This has introduced us to the world of adult rail fans on YouTube - people (all men so far) whose trainspotting hobbies have mixed with some good camera equipment, resulting in copious numbers of train videos.  Silas also still loves Dinosaur Train, and sometimes watches Daniel Tiger, Mister Rogers, or Peg+Cat.  We're still only doing screen time on the weekends.  That might change over the summer.

Silas has two real friends at the moment, M. and A.  A. is one of his classmates (just for another week, though) and M. is the daughter of some of our friends.  He loves these two girls and talks often about how he'll play with them.  They play very well together, disappearing for long periods without any need for supervision or intervention.  It's nice to see him making real friends.

Last, the difficult stuff.  Silas is always working on SOMEthing, and right now I think he's working on his concept of justice.  This has lead us to some pretty dark places.  Most notably, he overheard me one day saying that I heard a very sad radio program about a sick girl.  I didn't even describe the program, but I think my sadness made an impresion on him, and he asked about it the next morning.  I told him she was sick because there was a war in her country.  He asked what a war was ("War?  What is a war? I never heard of that.").  I said war is when grown-ups are fighting and they can't figure out how to stop.  I did not mention weapons or death, so as far as I'm aware he's imagining people hitting or yelling.  Nevertheless, this DEVASTATED him.  Immediately he wanted to take his doctor kit to help the children, wanted to give them his food, and asked me to send a message to the grown-ups to tell them to stop fighting.  The compassion pouring out of his little 2-year-old heart was unreal.  Particulary upsetting, as it turned out, the fact that the girl in the story (I didn't tell him that she died) actually had a mother, who was trying her best and yet could not help her daughter.  I think this was his first encounter with helpless parents that couldn't fix big problems.  For about 5 days after hearing about war Silas struggled mightily to take in this knowledge.  His sadness was so extreme, and so overwhelming, that we immediately started looking for resources about how to help him.  Everything we found informed us that children just need to be told that wars will not come to their country, that only grown-ups need to worry about wars, and that they will always be taken care of.  We could not find a single resource about this kind of thing in 2-year-olds; even children through age 7 or 8 are said to just need reassurance that they are safe.  Unfortunately, this did very little to reassure Silas.  He insisted he was not worried about himself, only the sick children who could not get enough food or medicine because of the fighting.  We sent donations to Save the Children, and only after I had explained to him how pushing buttons on my computer could result in money being given to children in South Sudan (internet banking:  not obvious to toddlers) did he start to feel better. He brought up wars, and his sadness about them, maybe 10 times a day for quite a few days, and his behavior was absolutely off the rails.  He was melting down 5 or 6 times a day.  Finally, the sadness seems to have passed and he is able to talk about it without falling apart.

However, he has new concerns, though thankfully they are milder.  First of all he's very concerned about jail:  who goes there, how they feel when they are in jail, why they made bad choices, and so on.  (He learned about jail from a passing reference in a Boxcar Children book.  After several days of feeling incredibly anxious that I introduced him to an adult concept I shouldn't have, I realized that almost all Disney movies, which people freely show toddlers, have mentions of bad people having justice done to them - brigs in ships, etc.  Silas's focus on these issues, which he could easily have ignored, is development-linked, I feel quite sure.) Once again, reassuring him that children are never allowed to go to jail (which isn't even entirely true, but I didn't tell him that) did not help - he seems very worried about the inmates.  He is also concerned about why and how people get old. He likes to bring these things up either when talking to puppets, or when he's lying in bed.  Talking face to face in daylight is often too intense for him.

He is also worried about justice and fairness in the context of his personal relationships, and this is really where his (totally reasonable and expected) lack of maturity shows up.  He is extremely good about never taking toys from his friends, and never pushing or hitting.  He uses his words impeccably.  Unfortunately, he expects the same high standards from everyone else - even little babies.  Today a tiny, barely-walking toddler innocently took a ball from him, and Silas imperiously pointed his finger, shouting in an outraged voice, "You may not take that ball!  I am using it!".  The nuance of when to stand up for yourself, when to move on, and when to talk to a grown-up is pretty complex and we definitely do not have it down yet.  He also doesn't really know how to "go with" a creative move from a friend, often insisting that they play HIS way.  Silas is extremely bossy when playing for us, often wanting to dictate every single move.  He provides us our own toys to play with (so, "sharing"), but tells us how to move them and gets upset if we play wrong.  We are starting to push back on this point and model more strategies for playing with people who aren't doing exactly what you want!  Silas has also had some jealousy lately.  His teachers report that he commands respect from his peers at school, being principled and well-behaved and kind, but he also wants to be first all the time, and after a year of scrupulous turn-taking, has occasionally been demanding his way at the expense of others. The other day, while talking about a friend who grabbed some toys from him, he announced the he was perfect! Of course this made my blood pressure rise a little bit, but I think he meant that he never takes toys from others - which is actually true.  In response, we have started asking him if, after playing with somebody, whether he was a good friend to them, and whether they were a good friend to him, and talking it all over.

Last but certainly not least, Silas is FULL of questions all the time.  He wants to know how everything works, where things come from, what they're made of, and so on and so forth forever.  The things we find ourselves explaining are sometimes remarkable.  A very, very select few that I happen to recall from this week:  explaining why we don't all share all cars and instead use keys that only we keep, why basil seedling leaves turn to the sun, how oatmeal is harvested (for the 50th time, he never gets tired of that one), how the little balls in the classic push-popper toy get energy to bounce (from you, as you push the toy, and you get your energy from food, which got its energy from the sun, which got its energy from the big bang, and after that I don't know)...

A brief list of summer plans, coming up:

1.  Potty training, early on
2.  A week in Brightwater with friend M. and her parents
3.  Day trips and weekend getawys
4.  Hannah's wedding
5.  A trip to the Mt. Washington cog railway
6.  Hopeful playdates with various friends
7.  Hopeful returns to Trampoline World, various museums, beaches, etc...

SIlas, 27 months

Silas has been demonstrating a dizzying array of new skills lately.  We often find ourselves looking at each other over his heads with eyebrows raised:  "Did you know he could do that?"  "No, did you?"

He's very responsible and loves to demonstrate that he knows what to do.  He instructs us on road safety when we're outside, telling us not to get too close to the edge of the sidewalk, to check for cars, to walk quickly across the street, and so on.  He even directs us to familiar places.  Although we still never let our guard down, 99% of the time he's very safe outside in the city.  I'm quite surprised by how capable he is at cleaning - I think it must be all the Montessori practice.  He insists on cleaning up all spills immediately.  He's pretty good at cleaning the floor.  Today he actually cleaned up the entire living room, by himself, unasked.  He put everything away in the right place, organized his toy baskets and didn't stop until every item was in its spot.  He loves washing dishes, too, but I think that's at least 50% about playing with water in the sink.

Sometimes he's quite polite.  He often says "Thank you for making this for me, Mama" when I fix him food, something we never asked him to say, so it's doubly gratifying.  He uses "please" and "thank you" frequently.  He excuses himself if he burps or sneezes and says "you're excused" if we emit some kind of impolite noise.  He even occasionally apologizes without prompting, in a very solemn and sincere way.  Again, I think a lot of this is the Montessori curriculum, Grace and Courtesy specifically.  Of course Silas is not always polite - he can be rude, gross, and downright mean at times, just like every other two-year-old out there.  (Tonight, after meticulously cleaning the entire living room, he spit out a big glob of rice onto the floor on purpose.  No respect for his own work!) But the skills are there and it's very sweet and humbling to be thanked for breakfast.  I've also tried very hard to impress upon him that housekeeping is real, valuable work that has an impact on everybody in the family - no devaluing of "women's work" in our house - and I think it's working.

Silas has had a bout of renewed interest in reading and letters, and he learned all the letter sounds a few weeks ago.  He also seems to know a few numbers, but it's hard to tell because he doesn't want to talk about them much.  He likes to read initials on trucks and such, and sometimes asks me to read what specific words say.  He doesn't understand how to sound out words yet, I don't think, but maybe it won't be too too long.  Just recently we tried writing letters in sugar with him (a trick from Grandma Susie and my childhood!) and he loved it, although he could only reproduce "O", "Q" and "T" correctly.

In addition to being interested in letters, Silas has also been asking us for definitions of new words lately.  Nothing seems to pass him by.  He also asks us frequent questions of all sorts:  "Where do cats come from?"  "Where did our washing machine come from?"  "What makes my train go?"  On and on and on.  Curiously, he has not yet adopted the single-word "why".

He moved into a "grown up bed" (we took the rail off his crib) a week ago, and although it has not totally solved his night waking issue (he's still anxious at night about animals), it has been mildly helpful and certainly not difficult.  So far he still hasn't ever fallen out, which really surprised me.  He seems very proud to have his own bed that he can climb into and out of on his own.

He's really into role play lately, and of course he wants to be the grown up.  He plays Mama or Papa in home scenarios, Teacher in school scenarios.  He likes to reassure us when we pretend to be scared or confused, and it's very sweet and gratifying to see that "mirror" of our parenting - when he plays Mama or Papa he is empathetic, confident, calm, and very generous.  I hope we can do as well!  Silas also sets up various complex imaginary scenarios, such as birthday parties, tracking animals, daring rescues, and so on.  He doesn't seem to need props of any kind, and often instructs us that a random patch of floor is a burning house, or a turtle, or a pond.  We are frequently dragooned into his scenarios and ordered around.  He's very bossy.

Although we have said very little about the possibility, Silas is trying to sell us on the idea of a sibling.  Recently he even put a doll up his shirt (out of nowhere, we had not been discussing babies) and said he was growing a baby.  When he deemed the baby ready to come out, he said he loved it and would teach it not to spill its snacks off its plate, among other things.  He even ate extra healthy food at dinner on behalf of the baby.

He loves cooking, and can make his own oatmeal for breakfast almost start to finish - it's simple instant oatmeal.  He and I do quite a lot of cooking together, mostly baking projects and various desserts.  He's quite earnest and careful, but still doesn't have the fine motor skills not to spill flour all over.  Oh well :)

His block building has also improved recently - he's building more complex 3D structures and starting to build tunnels, though not terribly well.  On several occasions recently he has worked VERY hard to build large, complicated buildings, and he usually announces every step in the process.

He's gotten interested in puzzles.  He's quite good on his own with jigsaw puzzles that have ~10 pieces, but needs help with one that has 25 - if I put in some edge pieces he can usually do the rest with some encouragement. I've been surprised by how drawn he is to puzzles.  I don't recall ever liking them much, but he often wants to do them - even hard ones - several times in a row.  We hear he has been doing puzzles at school frequently, too.

At school he has begun pointing out, totally on his own, who has brown skin and who has lighter skin.  Same with hair.

At home he seemed uninterested in board books and such, so I tried him out on a longer book, "Catwings", by my hero Ursula K. Le Guin.  To my surprise he sat motionless for the entire book, cover to cover and was sad when it was over.  We have since started both Charlotte's Web and My Father's Dragon, but I had to stop reading both about half way through because they got too sad (CW) or scary (MFD).  I really need to come up with some longer chapter books that are gentle enough for him.

It's not surprising that, as usual, he has at least one area of protest regarding his independence.  Lately it's his clothes.  He only wants to undress himself, but he knows that he can't get his shirt off unassisted, so sometimes he refuses to get undressed at all, even when he wants to take a bath.  This can lead to frustration all around.  He can get his pants and socks off by himself, fortunately.  He can also put on ALL his outdoor gear on his own - boots, coat, mittens, and one of his hats - which means we rarely have trouble leaving any more.

Only very recently, he has begun preferring masculine-coded clothes and saying that he does not like feminine-coded ones.

Due to my own interest in development, I've done a few simple tests with him, disguised as games.  I can report that his forward digit span is a solid 4, he does not understand the quantity 3, and he either does not notice or does not care about simple repeating patterns like alternating colors.  He can define many words that I ask him about and report the use of many different objects - in fact he often does that on his own.  He can give accurate instructions to me for a 3-step process (such as how to build a tunnel, how to prepare oatmeal, etc.).  He has excellent understanding of prepositions and uses them fluidly in his speech.  He understands that when enumerating objects you should touch each object only once, but he still does not understand how to count by enumeration.  (He'll touch each object once while counting, and then keep saying numbers after he's done with the objects.)  He can accurately identify the biggest/smallest, tallest/shortest (etc.) objects in a group, but doesn't seem to understand the concept of opposites yet.  He knows several colors, maybe about 6-8, but still mixes up some of them.

Last, his speech, as usual, is growing by leaps and bounds.  Lately we've seen the addition of "shouldn't" and "wouldn't", joining of clauses using "while" and "if", and much more complex sentence structure in general.  (Brown's stage V, I think.) He still has a bit of trouble using double negatives, and over-regularizes some verbs. And sometimes sentences come out of his mouth with incorrect grammar a few times before he stops and corrects himself.

Stubborn

Fun things Silas has NOT done in the last 2 days:
1. He did not go to the store with me to buy a new shelf last night. He asked to go with me, got really excited about it, then balked when it was time to get ready. I gave him 40 minutes to cooperate. He put on his shoes and coat twice, then took them off and ran away as soon as I went to open the door. I waited, because we didn't HAVE to go. Eventually it was too late. He was really upset that he couldn't go. Later, he told Brian he was so sad that he made the decision not to go.
2. He did not go to the supermarket with Brian this morning. Brian had to leave quickly. Silas asked to go with him. Brian said he could definitely come if he got ready quickly. Silas rushed to get his shoes, but when Brian asked him what the next step was, Silas started the whole sing/ignore/hide routine. Brian left. He had a meltdown.
3. He did not go swimming. We all went to the pool. Paid $15 for Brian to get in. Got to the locker room. We changed; Silas refused to wear his swim diaper. We gave him one chance to look at the pool and watch me swim before deciding whether he was going to cooperate and let us change him into his swimwear. He looked at the pool, pretended to be a kronosaurus on the floor, ignored us and sang a song, and eventually insisted that he would NOT wear his swim diaper. We told him this would result in two sad parents and going home immediately. He refused, so we went back into the locker room and changed again. He had a meltdown because we were not going swimming.
4. He did not go for a run with me. I said we could go, he said he wanted to come, I asked him whether he would like to get ready, he said yes, so I started getting dressed. Fully dressed, I stood by the door and asked him if he still wanted to come. He ignored me, hid in the bedroom, and refused to talk (cheeky smile, squirming). After 10 minutes I took off my running clothes. He yelled at me and repeated "I just want to go for a run in the stroller" like 500 times in a row.
5. He did not end up going to the museum with Brian. He begged to go all morning, Brian agreed, the started out in the snow, with Silas in the stroller since the snow wasn't deep. Halfway through the ride Silas, who had been eating a bar with his mittens off, got cold hands and began to cry. He refused to wear his mittens, screaming at Brian whenever Brian tried to put them on. Brian obviously rushed Silas home since his hands were freezing and he was a total screaming mess. At home, Silas had a tantrum about not being at the museum for a good 10 minutes. For the rest of the morning he talked about how sad he was that he wasn't at the museum.

We're exhausted.

I'm afraid this will sound whiny, but WE HAVE TRIED EVERYTHING. We have a big clock so Silas can keep an eye on the passage of time - and it works great when he knows we really do have to leave. He can accurately discern whether or not the hand on the clock is in a certain position.  Good tool except he rebels against the clock because he knows it's really OUR plan. We play the fool, pretending we don't know how to get ready and putting boots on our heads and such. He laughs and loves to correct us, but doesn't necessarily cooperate. We let Silas choose to set a timer for when we will start to get ready - he presses the buttons and everything. We talk beforehand about what it means, how we should keep our word, and make sure he verbally tells us exactly what he should do when the timer rings. We have tried telling him we will be leaving in 5 minutes, and setting the timer ourselves, and then nonchalantly beginning the process - kind of just matter of factly assuming he will cooperate. Nope. We have tried carefully observing whatever he's doing and making sure to comment sensitively on his latest activity/whatever, and saying that we will leave at XYZ time that fits in with his game. No effect, because most of the time we've managed things such that he's not busy with anything when we have to leave - most of the time HE HIMSELF ASKED TO LEAVE and he's not doing anything else except watch us with a devious eye. We've tried singing and dancing and basically making it seem super fun to get ready, making it a contest ("who can get their coat on faster?"), being enthusiastic in general. We've tried talking about how it's really hard for him to feel like we're telling him what to do, and backing waaaaaaaaaaay the hell off, even LITERALLY backing off down the hallway and getting him to do it all himself while we silently wait for up to 10 minutes. I'd say this is more successful than anything else, but still nowhere near 100%. We say his dolls or cars want to go out, or bring his loveys and say Monkey and Creature want some fresh air, and ask him to talk to them and tell them what to do to get ready, and he loves to order them around, but don't always follow through himself.  And of course, since Silas was tiny (maybe 5 months?) we have been offering him choices whenever possible, and we NEVER pick him up or do things for him without letting him know.  Offering choices was a magic bullet from about ~19-22 months, and then apparently Silas deduced that when I offer him two acceptable choices, I want him to do at least one of them.  He set up his picket lines and began protesting even his OWN plans.

The worst bit is that sometimes, when he's REALLY mad, he'll hit us - almost always me.  He has never hit anybody else, ever, and while we're relieved that he can control himself elsewhere, it feels terrible to be the target.  He knows it's absolutely not allowed, and it seems to start him on a shame spiral which leads to more misbehavior.  What a mess.

Silas knows how to get ready; he can find his coat, boots and mittens and put them on.  He knows what needs to be done.  He's just stubborn, and he smells coercion a thousand miles away, and the second it seems like leaving the house is on MY agenda, not just his, he's making an ideological stand in the living room.  

The best we can do is demonstrate, over and over and over again, that we will give him as much freedom as we can to make choices, and when he makes the choice not to cooperate, he ends up having less fun and sometimes we all feel bad. At the moment he is obsessed with autonomy, and getting autonomy in a family is a really mixed bag and he is hopefully realizing that too.

Yesterday morning we were leaving for school and although everything went fine, I was over-prepared in case he balked, so I was goofily pretending to put on my jacket upside down. Silas stood silently off to the side as I made a fool of myself and then said "I have a hypothesis Mama, THAT'S NOT GOING TO WORK". Which exactly, precisely, summarizes my feelings on the matter.

Meals

I think we're in a pretty good place right now with our meals and overall nutrition.  We have a rotating list of dinner menus, a bunch of standard breakfasts, and each of us has a few preferred lunches.  I'm sure it'll continue to change slowly as time goes on, but I thought I'd record it.

Breakfasts:
1.  Oatmeal made with almond milk, peanut butter and raisins, half a grapefruit or clementine
2.  Whole wheat English muffins with butter, an egg for me, half a grapefruit or clementine, soy milk.  We probably eat this breakfast more than half the time.
3.  Cereals:  BOLA granola with almonds, Heritage O's (oat and other whole grain flours) or raisin bran, either with cow's milk or almond milk, some kind of fruit.
4.  Greek yogurt with a teaspoon of maple syrup, frozen or freeze-dried raspberries, some kind of fruit, orange juice.

Silas loves grapefruits, buttered whole wheat English muffins, Greek yogurt with maple syrup and raspberries, and he CLAIMS to love cereals and granola but he almost never finishes!  He also gets gummy vitamins with fish oil sometimes.

Lunches:
1.  Hilary's Best veggie patties or mock chicken patties with whole wheat burger buns, bell peppers, apple or clementine
2.  High-fiber ramen noodles (GreeNoodles) in broth or peanut sauce with freeze dried veggies (it sounds like the worst kind of health food but I swear it tastes great)
3.  Peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat, banana or apple or clementine, whole grain crackers

Silas gets dinner leftovers (complete with veggies) for all his school lunches, and on the weekends he often requests a burger bun with ketchup.

Snacks:
1.  Peanut butter on brown rice cakes
2.  Peanut butter and raisins on banana slices
3.  Whole grain crackers and string cheese
4.  Apples or applesauce
5.  Clementines
6.  Hummus, baby carrots
7.  Avocado slices on crackers
8.  Fruit juice
9.  Nuts and raisins

Silas also gets pouches of pureed fruits and vegetables and sometimes extra stuff like chia seeds.  He also gets energy bars when we're out and about.  They have some sugar which isn't ideal, but overall the nutrition is pretty good and he loves them.  He also gets juice boxes in the car, but at home we usually have cider and orange juice and tart cherry.

Dinners:
1.  Whole wheat pasta with parmesan (or pesto if we're lucky), steamed green beans, mashed sweet potato with lemon
2.  Braised collard greens with onions, brown rice with butter, steamed edamame
3.  Steamed broccoli with lemon and olive oil, mock chicken (it's made from gluten, pea protein and soy, sometimes we add a yogurt based sauce or Indian spices), mashed potato
4.  Red lentil dal with coconut, whole wheat naan, sauteed cabbage
5.  Annie's mac and cheese, fried tempeh, sauteed zucchini

Silas eats most of the stuff on this list.  No luck with cabbage or collard greens though he dutifully tastes it every time.  His favorite thing of all is probably buttered rice and edamame.

We rarely have dessert, maybe once every 2 weeks.  We tend to eat out once a week - often pizza at Pinocchios, or Basta Pasta, or Giggling Rice Thai food.  We also visit a cafe every week (almost always Petsi Pies) for a croissant, and sometimes we find something exciting to eat at the farmer's market.

Treats:
1.  Home-made hot chocolate
2.  Weekend cafe trips for pastries
3.  Cooking projects of all kinds - muffins, breads, cookies, candies
4.  Occasional gelato
5.  People give us chocolates surprisingly frequently and then we have to dose them out over days

So I'm feeling pretty good about it overall.  We have only a couple regular sources of added sugar - there's brown sugar in the granola and a little bit in the cereals, 6g per serving, and another 6g in a serving of jelly, plus we sometimes use maple syrup.  The only refined grain is the Annie's mac and cheese.  We don't have chips/candy/soda/other refined-carb temptations in the house.  Because of that, I feel pretty free to indulge Silas in hot chocolate or home-made candies or pastries or whatever whenever we get a baking urge.  To my surprise, he usually won't even eat a single cookie and asks for more fruit.  On a few bizarre occasions I have even found myself trying to cajole him into eating more of a cookie rather than just carrying it around.