It's my blog, and I'll brag if I want to ...

I thought I'd share some of what we think are the impressive things Maggie is doing and saying these days:

• She can look at the exterior of our house (like if we're playing in the yard) and point out things on the inside. For example, she'll point to the right-hand side of the house and say "That's where the stairs are," then to her bedroom window, "That's where I sleep." I don't know why, exactly, but I find this impressive.


• Today, on the way to preschool, we passed one of those big towers that power lines are attached to. Maggie said she thought she'd seen the Eiffel Tower, and I asked her where. "Back there," she said. "We already passed it." I told her she'd have to be sure to show me when we came back. (It was going to be a while, because she went to Mammaw's house after preschool.) She replied, "When we come back this way after school and Mammaw's house is over? Then we'll be going home?" Again, I don't know why exactly, but I found this impressive too. It's like she's grasping unseen concepts more and more, like time in this story, and space in the story above.


• She's still very into spelling words and sounding them out for herself to figure out how they're spelled.


• She's doing more and more around the house without having to be asked. She'll throw her trash away rather than dropping it everywhere, and she'll take her plate and cup to the sink when she's finished eating.


• She's making up a lot of stories blending people we know, places we frequent, etc. Tonight we were treated to a dinnertime story about Sarah Beth (a girl we met at Stride Rite on Monday) going to Club Theo (a kids' group at our church) and seeing a monster.
• She has gotten really good using our computer mouse and playing computer games. She even knows how to click the 'X' to close a window, and how to "surf" her favorite sites (PBS Kids, mainly). It's cute to see how I'll start her off playing one game, and when I come back to check on her, she's playing something totally different -- and she got there all by herself!


• Dare I say it ... she's starting to do VERY simple reading. We're talking three-letter, one-vowel words like Pop, cup, hop, map, hug ... that sort of thing. I write them on her Magna Doodle and she points to each letter, making the sound. She'll say, "puh ... ahhh ... puh" and then put them together to get Pop (her name for my dad). We played this game last week while waiting in the doctor's office, and she probably got about eight different words right before she got totally distracted and said Tad for every word I wrote. There are a couple of words that she knows by sight -- cat and dog, to name two -- but when we were doing this in the doctor's waiting room, I purposely used words she's less familiar with. I think she's in the very early, early, early stages of reading!

Oh, I finally uploaded some spring pictures into our Shutterfly family collection, so be sure to check them out!