Brian Update

Well, it took a while, but now I’m going to get together some pictures of Brian too.  What to say about Brian… he is hilarious.  He is sweet, funny, kind, and like all kids his age (I imagine, not having much grounds for comparison) at times very stubborn and exasperating.  I wish I had cameras rolling on him all the time because you really never know when something interesting is going to come out of his mouth.  Here he is talking to his best friend Roby:

Some common Brian-isms:

“Mom, I think I’ll love you forever.”  (Although today he told me he’d love me for 10 minutes, not sure if this is a long time or a short time in his book.)

“This is dee-licious!  Mom, you make the best [sandwiches, fish, etc.]”  Then proceeds to spit it out. 

“Look, mom, I made the baby stop crying!” after he sings the ABCs very loudly, which does usually stop the crying.  Probably odds are 50/50 that he precipitated the crying incident though. 

Words he still says wrong, that we adore: Hostipal, mizzagna (lasagna), and incited for excited (I’m so incited!).  Not too many anymore!  His speech is really very understandable.  And his choice of words makes him sound like a “little old soul”, as his preschool teacher said. 

He is very agreeable and I can usually get him to do whatever I suggest.  I want to work on pattern drafting?  No problem, he will too:

He is game to try new things, like building structures out of toothpicks and marshmallows.  It probably helps that this was on Curious George (I think TV is the source of a lot of the facts he comes up with, it’s amazingly educational.)

At first he did try to make a tower straight up, just a marshmallow, a toothpick, a marshmallow… well, that’s as far as you get before it falls over. So I showed him how to make a square, and in a fit of teacher-ness tried to show how a trigonal pyramid is more stable than a cube, but that was a bit much.  In the background you can see the art lessons we were working on, with the color wheel, and primary colors, etc.  He was only marginally interested and still prefers to do painting his way (all green).   Though lately we have made an interesting jump from this:

To this:

 

It’s subtle, I guess, but noticeable to me: he went from essentially filling a page (the Wegman’s boat actually shows a lot of restraint, in that there is white space left) to wanting to do very specific things (making a handprint, writing letters, writing with a grown-up pencil).  His drawings now are all so procedural that I really need to get a video.  They tell stories… it’s hard to explain, but he narrates what he is drawing as he goes, so although the end result is a page of swirly lines every time, they are of radically different things.

He has gotten into imaginative play, which is so cute.  Here he is, his dinos driving a car up a mountain:

It was more involved than that, but he wouldn’t tell me where they were going.  Today he was the Cat in the Hat, and anything I wanted, he would pull out of his hat. 

He remains a little sports-challenged, and I struggle with whether to send him to a class so he can improve, or to wait till his coordination improves, then send him, so he will enjoy it more.  We did a sampler sports class at the Y.  It was pretty funny, and I’m glad I didn’t shell out big bucks for it. 

He is sick today, so I should leave it at this and go to bed… odds are good we’ll be up during the night!