ABCs

A month or two ago we had some friends over; their little boy, Gavin, is just a year older than Alyssa. They were playing with the letter magnets on the fridge, and he knew all the letters while Alyssa didn't know any. Here's a sample of what their conversation was like:

Gavin: This is G.
Alyssa (holding a B): That G
Gavin: No that's B.
Alyssa (now holding an S): That B
Gavin: That's S.

Alyssa became somewhat frustrated rather quickly. She's been doing letter puzzles since her birthday and Christmas, so we started teaching her a few letters. We started with A (for Alyssa), then added L (for Lauren), M (for Momma), and D (for Daddy). From there we branched out to P, N, G, W, S for others and it seemed like within just a few weeks she had all the letters down. We didn't realize how well she was doing with them until one night we were sitting at the table, eating a pasta dish, and all of a sudden she's saying "P-A-R-M-E-S-A-N". It took us a minute to figure it out, but she was reading the letters on the Parmesan cheese container. She sees letters everywhere, she'll read the letters on your clothes or on boxes. And while reading books at night, she's looking at the letters. Sometimes she'll look at a page and be all upset: "There's no A for me on this page." Aaron and I are pretty sure we didn't teach her all the letters, but she knows them all somehow. And just in the past week she's started singing the alphabet song (I think they've been singing that at day care). I caught her on tape singing the song one night so I thought I'd share. It's not her best version of it but you can probably make it out.



And this video of her is from sometime about a month ago when she was still learning most of them.



In other news on the Alyssa front, she is potty trained. She's been wearing big girl undies for about a week now. She's been ready to get rid of the pull ups for a while now but she wouldn't wear undies until I bought her some princess ones and that's all it took. She's doing so great. She's only had one accident and that was this past Sunday after church. She was in the kitchen while the rest of us were upstairs changing our clothes. All of a sudden she was crying and we came down to see her standing in a puddle of pee in the middle of the bathroom. Apparently she couldn't get her tights off in time. She was pretty upset, but that's her first accident in a long while. She's still in diapers at nap time and over night as she almost always wakes up wet, but we're pretty excited by this new phase. She's gone potty in stores, church, and even the port-a-john at the Tulip Time festival last weekend. And when we traveled to PA a few weeks ago, she didn't even have an accident in the car. As she'll tell you, she's not a baby, she's a big girl!