Puzzling it Out

Jonah's interest in his trains and cars has waned a bit recently, as he has taken a budding interest in doing puzzles. He got a great set of four small transportation-themed puzzles for his birthday. Each puzzle has 12 pieces, which was just about the right number for his patience until he began focusing on them more intensely.

Ben and I explained to him a number of concepts that adults might use in solving puzzles: things like "outside" pieces, how to look for pieces of the puzzle that relate to one another pictorially (pieces that have sky in them, for example), and to understand what we call "knobbies" and "holes" and how pieces fit together (you can't connect a hole to a hole). For the most part, Jonah's initially success with the puzzles was entirely a matter of trial and error (and a lot of asking for help, which we tended to provide only minimally, mixed with the occasional outbreak in frustration). He's become much more proficient of late and managed to get a 24-piece puzzle together with minimal help on his own last night. Here he is doing one of the 12-piece puzzles late last month:

Lately, I've caught him using some self-talk that indicates he is beginning to get some of the concepts that we've been talking about. One night last week, I heard him tell himself that he needed to find another tree piece and also that he was matching the pieces that both contained the train conductor's hair. It is so cool to see how his thinking and skills are developing!

The soaker

Jonah has been helping water the flowers with his watering can throughout the summer and has become much more competent at doing so. Recently, he started asking if he could use the hose to water the plants too.  While Ben was traveling last week, I handed the hose over to Jonah, knowing he would probably get pretty soaked but figuring that it would be some good, clean fun.

Unfortunately, I'd left my phone inside because it was nearly dead, so I missed some great footage where Jonah was really spraying the water as far as he could and where he talked about trying to spray the helicopter and planes that were flying overhead. However, after seeing him having such a good time, I forced him to go back inside with me to grab my phone to record some more. It was after this that he decided to turn the hose on ME:

Unfortunately, before I was finished recording, I ran out of space on my phone (I've now deleted hundreds of pictures I'd been letting build up), so the video cut off before Jonah accidentally sprayed himself a number of times, turned the hose back on me once again, and decided he wanted to spray the "for sale" sign in our yard.

While he WAS quite wet by the time we finished, this is a good reminder to myself to say YES to him more often when he wants to do things like this. We both had a blast, it was time to change him from his clothes into his pajamas anyways, and Jonah had a learning experience as well!

The next American Idol?

While Jonah has for some time been able to recite portions of books, songs, nursery rhymes and the like, he has recently been able to repeat longer and longer sections of favorite books and some songs in their entirety. Yesterday morning, I overheard him singing portions of On Top of Spaghetti while I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes (in particular, he was singing the portion about rolling under the bush, being nothing but mush, growing into a tree covered with moss, etc.). He currently loves to go round and round poles (on the playground), Ben's and my legs, or just about anything and sing Ring Around the Rosie, and I've heard a fair amount about London Bridge. He has recently asked both Ben and me to increase the number of songs we sing to him before he goes to bed: he insists that I sing him "three songs in the crib," and thereafter, "one song in the dark," as I leave the light on while I sing the first three to him.

But it definitely melts our hearts to hear Jonah sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. He will launch into it at the most random moments, and he often turns it into an ongoing round, which I'm sure we will eventually tire of. I was able to capture him at one of these moments while we were on a hike at Lapham Peak on Sunday:

I need to go back to think of other popular nursery rhymes and songs to sing/recite with him as he definitely is seeming open to it at this point!