Although describing his drawings as ‘hairy balls’ will never get old.

The counting thing actually sounds pretty advanced for his age (or definitely within the huge range doctors call “normal”). Ian (who is almost 2 and a half) learned a curious little song from his parents long (to him) ago. It goes, “one two three four five six seven eight nine ten.” It’s all in a monotone – boring song, actually, but being a verbal child he would say it to himself or sing along with us from time to time.

Much later, he learned the concepts of “one” and “two” as they relate to a quantity of objects. He’s recently generalized to “three.” It’s hard to tell if he understands “more than” and “fewer than” as it realtes to numbers higher than three.

I guess my point is that the ability to sing that little song is divorced from understanding what those words mean. If Robin knows when he has two cars versus one, he’s doing fine .

Colors as well sounds right on schedule, if not ahead. Cat was worried that Ian might be color blind until a few months ago. He knew how to pronounce the words for many colors, and he knew that it was appropriate to use these words to describe objects. And there his understanding ended. It was actually kind of amusing to see which color word he’d use on an object (but only because he’s our second child so we weren’t really stressing over it). We figured he was trying out the words and that it was our job to correct him.

Recognizing and attempting to write letters at that age is amazing. You can definitely stop fretting .