Administrative Notes

Warning: If you are one of the people who checks this blog periodically to see what funny crap my kids have been up to, this post might not be one of the better ones to read.

When I set out on this little venture a little over two years ago, I declared that OFFICIALLY I was doing it to help track our kids' development through their first years for future reference. The fact that I would be mostly poking fun along the way was just a byproduct of my definitely cerebral act of maintaining a running analysis of the different ways our kids grew up. Definitely cerebral. But, in order to keep up that facade, I feel as though I have to make periodic entries that focus almost entirely on that topic, and I'm probably way overdue for something like that right now.

Hello future Norah! Probably by now you are wondering why I only address you and not Gabe from time to time. Possibly it is unfair of me to do so, but based on what I'm seeing right now, I'm pretty sure that only you will have the patience or interest to actually read through these posts. While we plan to share them with both of you at some undisclosed point in the future, it's pretty apparent, based on what we're seeing of your blossoming personalities, that Gabe will scan through these pages, look at the pictures, click on any videos that look especially amusing, watch five or ten seconds of them, then move on to the next page. You, on the other hand, might actually have some interest in reading these posts and jumping back a decade or two in time and seeing your development through our eyes. Or not, in which case I'm only wasting quite a substantial amount of my time and the time of the few people who read this blog. Surely you don't want all that time to have been wasted simply because you don't want to read all the way through these posts? I thought not.

It's actually very interesting watching how differently the two of them have developed over this last year. In many ways, Norah is almost caught up with Gabe in some areas and even exceeds him in one or two. She has always had significantly more patience for drawing or staying focused on one thing for an extended period of time, and it's only been in the last six months or so that Gabe has finally started to do the same thing. Where Gabe still doesn't fully comprehend the necessity for "contained" drawing--meaning coloring in the lines with different colors or drawing a shape instead of just scribbling all over a piece of paper--Norah is already showing some signs of understanding the ideas behind it. Most of the time, when she's drawing, she makes her little "thinking" moan and draws circles. Endless, endless circles. She's drawn thousands of them. She's filled a dozen or so color books and drawing pads with them. She likes circles. But she has also made some attempts at coloring figures in the books. She's no good at it yet, but I can tell that she's trying to actually color within the lines instead of just applying color to the page in general as Gabe often does.

Another thing that Gabe has only recently shown interest in is his little Leapster keyboard/game system/whatever thingy we bought him for his second birthday. We've had the thing for two years. We bought it hoping that Gabe would glom onto it and it would help him learn his letters and numbers. See, it's a cartridge game system that uses a little keyboard and mouse interface to play the games. We've got four games plus the ones that are built in, and all of them focus on basic reading/counting skills and learning how to use a keyboard and mouse. We also figured that it wouldn't be a bad idea to familiarize him with those things as early as possible, too, since he's going to be using them for most of his life. Well, until they are replaced by something better. But familiarizing him with the technology seemed like a good idea.

But he's had NO interest in it. He refused to learn how to work the mouse, the games seemed to bore him, and he never put together that the letters on the screen had a coinciding letter on the keyboard. Until about three weeks ago. Now, about once a day, he wants to go up and play his games. Sometimes it keeps his focus for an hour, sometimes five minutes. He still hasn't quite figured out how to make the mouse do what he wants to end one game and start a new one, and he can't work out how to reset the system when he puts a new cartridge in, but I assume that will come soon enough.

The thing is, though, Norah is already working all this stuff out. Gabe is very protective of the keyboard when he's up there. He refuses to let her mess with it, and if he has to come down to use the bathroom or something, he asks me to put the keyboard up somewhere high so she won't mess with it while he's gone. But the times when he isn't paying attention, she's already starting to work out how to use the mouse. I see her watching the screen as she moves the cursor and figuring it out. It's really pretty fascinating.

And forget about language skills. Norah is almost a full year ahead of how Gabe developed linguistically. Possibly more than a year. Because it's free (and because we had a few concerns with how slowly Gabe seemed to be progressing linguistically), we signed up for a Parents as Teachers program. One of the workers comes out every six weeks and spends a little time with the kids to see how they are coming along. Gabe was never behind, as such--and now he's pretty much right where he's supposed to be (except for a few glaring exceptions, like the use of his binky)--but he was certainly never ahead of where he should have been. Norah, on the other hand, is WELL ahead of where almost two year olds typically are. The PaT lady said that, by two, kids will typically just be putting a couple words together in "sentences." Norah has been doing that for a few months now and is starting to piece together some rather complicated series of words and modifiers. A little bit ago, she asked me for "up high crackers," meaning she wanted some of the Club crackers we keep on top of one of our cabinets instead of the saltines or pretzels we have on a lower cabinet.

And she is becoming comprehensible much more quickly than Gabe did. Now, MOST of what Gabe says is understandable to people who are only around him from time to time. Complete strangers will still cock their heads to one side and ponder his meanings sometimes, but that's mostly because he tends to talk really fast and worry less about pronunciation than just getting all the sounds out as quickly as possible. But even by three years old, it took a trained ear to pick up most of what he was saying. I would say Norah is to that point right now. Some words only those of us around her all the time know what she's saying, but she's moving pretty quickly with that stuff and might be caught up with Gabe in the next six months or so.

On the other hand, she's moving rather slowly on the gross motor end of things. I'm pretty sure Gabe was climbing the stairs with gusto by this point. Norah CAN go up the stairs, but she usually just goes up a stair, sits down for five minutes, goes up another stair, sits down for five minutes, and so forth. She just doesn't have a lot of interest in going places or doing things. I can respect that. But she IS showing increased interest in being outside, which is good. I mean, it sucks, because I hate being outside, but I know it's what's best for my kids and I'll take the nature bullet for them. And it's especially good for her because, well, she needs the exercise. Rather badly.

The one thing I wonder, though, is how much of Norah's development can be attributed to Gabe being around. Is she developing language more quickly to communicate with him, where Gabe didn't have to worry about it much because we were always there interpreting and providing him with what he needed without much effort on his part? Is she moving around less quickly because she has Gabe to watch running all around her and doesn't need to supply her own physical entertainment? It IS rather interesting. Just probably not to all of you. Maybe the next post will be more entertaining!