"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!
No comments:
Post a Comment