Dot's Spot

Dot stuffed all of her little toy animals into her onesie and started walking around patting her tummy. Is she trying to look like her Mama?

This afternoon, I opened a new pack of crayons for Dot, since the others were worn down to nubs. I gave her a coloring book and she started to color with the crayons in the order they came in – red, orange, yellow – putting them back into the case once she used each one. Then she skipped a couple of crayons. I pointed that out to her, but she just looked back down and picked out the green, blue, and purple. Except for the first three, they weren’t in the right order in the case – but she knew which order the colors of the rainbow were! She colored with the other four colors, too, but off to the side a little bit, not on top of her rainbow. Both Grandma and I were speechless.

We went shopping at Publix today. Three or four people stopped to say how cute Dot was. She was perfectly happy in her stroller flirting with everyone. She was very good today.

I gave Dot another cylinder block (Block 3) to play with. (Block 2 and 4 still have pieces that are a bit too small for me to trust her with, although I don’t let her play with any of these unsupervised.) This one posed no problem for her either. She got the first six blocks in with no mistakes on the first try.

I gave her the Montessori Pink Tower to try out tonight. She LOVED it, and was busy stacking them up perfectly as we were pulling them out of the package! There was NO time to get the camera, especially since I had the memory card out. She is totally surprising me on this – I honestly figured that these items would take at least a little bit of effort! This was another Montessori lesson geared towards 3 to 3 1/2 years old. I’m running out of things to challenge her with that still has parts made for kids less than three! (She still has to put everything into her mouth.)

This morning I unpacked one of the cylinder blocks (Block 1) for Dot to experiment with. She immediately took them out and started putting them back in while I scrambled for the camera. She had it mastered within two minutes. I thought she would at least have taken the morning to figure it out. I didn’t even get a chance to demonstrate it for her. This Montessori educational tool was made for 3 to 3 1/2 years old. Agreed, she isn’t doing all four blocks together noiselessly and blindfolded, but I think she did more than can be expected for her age. She played with them all day, practicing counting one through ten while she took the blocks out and back in. I think this was a great second birthday present. Now I have to figure out why she was taking the blocks (and my phone) and smacking herself in the back of the head with them. It would hurt and she would cry and she would do it over and over. Sometimes she is super smart and other times I can’t figure her out at all.

The new layout is complete! What do you think? Dot picked out the pattern and colors. She kept picking these three pieces out of a set of ten. After a few days I added ten more pieces, and she kept picking the same three out of a total of twenty pieces. I will be tweaking the header colors a bit next weekend, but overall I think she did a good job!