ABCs

As I sat in my office tonight sending e-mails to Whit while she took the train home, I got to listen to one of the sweetest sounds. I listed to Dylan playing with Todd. But it wasn't playing make believe or having a tea party or naming all of the Little People animals.

Dylan was playing a game that we've started playing on a more regular basis. A game that Todd has never seen us play, a game I don't think he even knows about. In fact, I'm not even sure I'd call it a game. Dylan thinks it is, I think it's a learning tool. She loves it, and it was wonderful to hear her "play" this game with Todd.

We have a huge boardbook that teaches the letters of the alphabet and numbers 1-10. It has different items that start with each specific letter and a cute running poem that tells about the alphabet. Dylan enjoys this book. She always has. But lately we've started taking the letters from her leapfrog magnetic set and she chooses a letter and matches it to the correct letter in the book.

She can't sing her ABCs, in fact, she doesn't even like to try, but she loves to match up the letters, and she can now identify almost, if not all of them.

Tonight I listened to her call out a letter, and Todd notice she was right, then turn the pages in the book until she found the right page. This happend three or four times in a row without Dylan making a mistake. I think Todd started to pay a little bit more attention to her game and was somewhat surprised that she knew her letters as well as she did. I finally went and grabbed the camera to take a shot or two of them learning the alphabet together.