Paul and the Family

Brian has a pretty amazing sense of visual perception/recognition. For a long time now he’s been able to identify stores and brands based on their logos — once while we were looking at toys in Target, he had a woman convinced that he could read because he was walking down the aisle naming the brands and contents of every Lego set on the aisle (he was three at the time).

This morning, this manifested itself once again. While eating his generic-brand frosted flakes and looking at the box (why do kids like to look at the cereal box while they eat?) he commented about some “little tails” on a particular letter. I looked at what he was pointing out, and sure enough he was right—the cereal box uses a serif font for the product name, so the letters indeed had “little tails.” I pointed out a couple more, and he started pointing out how the serifs were different shapes on different letters. At that point I figured that if he is smart enough to identify them, I might as well explain what we were looking at, so I told him about what a font is and what a serif is, and we ended up having a little chat about the topic.

Definitely not the conversation I would expect to be having with a four-year-old.

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And while I’ve got your attention, Adam’s been doing some funny stuff too. He’s really been getting into diggers and trains lately. And since he has an older brother, there are plenty of toys, books, movies, etc. around to feed his interest. One thing he’s gotten really interested in is “Bob the Builder” — it’s a claymation TV show about a man named Bob who builds/fixes just about anything from roads to soccer fields to farm buildings to pizza parlors, and the talking machines that help him work (we have a few episodes on video — we’ve never actually watched it on TV).

We have a bunch of Duplo blocks of Bob the Builder characters and vehicles (plus building materials, naturally) that we’ve found at a used toy store. Adam loves to play with them. But the funniest thing is the way he says “Bob the Builder” every time he sees one of the toys or videos or books with Bob on it. (And, I must admit, I think it’s so funny that I sometimes encourage him to say it just for fun.) Unfortunately it’s impossible to spell out, but it’s something like “Bob-da-bil-da-bil-da” — he almost always adds in the extra syllables in the middle (I think that’s called “reduplication” but I’m not positive — it’s been a while since I took phonology. Hopefully Professor Gess isn’t reading this =).

Poor Adam. Since we had Sarah so soon (17 months) after we had Adam, he was thrust into the famously unenviable role of middle child before he really had a chance to finish being a baby. Ever since he was very young he tried to emulate Brian, wanting to walk and run and play with cars and legos. He still tries to be involved with and be like Brian a lot. However, we’ve recently noticed a new side of him; well, it’s not really new, but it is sort of.

Now that Sarah is old enough that she pays attention to and plays with toys (well, she bats at them at least), and makes noises, and grabs any finger or ear that comes too close, Adam is starting to spend some of his time wanting to be like Sarah rather than wanting to be like Brian. He’ll lay down next to her and stare at her, pat her on the head or tickle her tummy (the noises he makes when doing this are quite entertaining). He also shares toys with her, and tries to talk to her with his limited vocabulary.

He’s had a renewed interest in baby toys as well — often when Sarah has one of those crinkly noise maker fuzzy textured teething kind of toys (those of you who have a baby know what toys I mean) then Adam will want one too. He’s started insisting on always having at least one and usually three blankets with him, and he’s even started carrying around a fuzzy bunny stuffed animal — something he never was interested in when he was a baby.

I’m sure some of this is a response to the fact that he was replaced by Sarah as the “baby” of the family, and he wants to get the attention that she is getting. And some of it is wanting to play with her now that she is able to respond and therefore possibly play games with him. And some of it is just inexplicable.

Lately Adam has been having trouble eating, something that is unusual for him. Of course, Brian went through a phase like this too at some point, where he always ate well and then suddenly decided not to eat anything at all — so maybe this isn’t a cause for concern. But what we would never have predicted is Adam’s sudden interest in Sarah’s diet (and specifically adopting it as his own diet).

A couple of days ago Kelli started giving Sarah baby food. As always, we started with Rice cereal. You know the stuff — it comes in a box and looks sort of like potato flakes, and you mix it with water so it looks like really wet plaster, then you put it in the baby’s mouth and he/she immediately spits it out again. Well, Kelli had Sarah in the high chair (the first time I had seen Sarah in the high chair) and was just starting to feed her some of this cereal. Since Sarah was just starting out, the consistency still was much more like milk than oatmeal or any other real cereal — but hey, you have to start somewhere, right?

Meanwhile, by Sarah’s second bite or so Adam had become interested in what was going on (this was before I started taking pictures, too, so we can’t use that as an explanation). He started saying “hum! hum!” (which is how he says “some! some!” meaning “I want some of that stuff!”). He was getting pretty frustrated, so Kelli decided to give him a spoonful so that he would know it was flavorless stuff and wouldn’t ask for any more. She gave him a bite, warning him that it tastes yucky. He ate it, laughed a bit, and five seconds later was saying “more! more!”.

A bit incredulously, Kelli mixed up a bowl of rice cereal and gave it to Adam. And would you believe, he practically inhaled the bowl he ate it so fast. His hand literally didn’t stop moving as he scooped a bite, shoved it in his mouth, and went back for another bite. “More! more!” he exclaimed, and unable to control our laugher we gave him another, bigger bowl full. All in all he ate three big bowls of rice cereal that night, and two more a couple of nights later.

I still can’t decide if he really likes the flavorless cereal more than the normal food we give him, or if he just likes being like Sarah, but in any case, he still hardly touches most food we give him, but he can’t seem to eat rice cereal fast enough.