Sunday, September 11, 2005
Lunar Milestone
Tonight we spelled a word in front of Sadie for the first time ever.
M-O-O-N
See, a while back we went looking for a good bedtime book to become the ritual to replace the final nursing of the day, which was the final one to be given up. We found a book called “The Moon In My Room.” It’s terribly cute; a board book about getting that same book read as a bedtime story, and about the “moon light.” It has a moon face nightlight built in, poking through a round cutout all the way through the book’s pages. You press the moon, it lights for several minutes, then it fades out. A kid can use it as a nightlight/flashlight and take comfort that it’s there. She’s not old enough for that yet, but she instantly loved the book and the new routine, not even missing the previous routine.
Now we ask if she’s ready for “the moon book” to give her a chance to tell us explicitly she’s ready for bed. Sometimes I’ll say “moon book” at an inappropriate time, just to tease and get a rise out of her. We’ll also chorus back and forth with “moooooooon booook” exactly the way they do with “Booh Bah” at the beginning of that show.
Tonight I wanted to refer to the book conversationally without getting her excited, so I spelled moon. That was a first.
I highly recommend the book in question. It’s cute, and it encourages the smooth acceptance of bedtime. She turns the pages, and it interested her in such a way that it taught her what books are, so now she’s more inclined to sit still for a story, and a little less inclined to treat them as objects for destruction. She treats the moon book with surprising respect. It’s a comfort item she sleeps with now. It’ll probably help the transition to her own bedroom in the new apartment.
She’s growing up so fast! The fact is, she recognizes so much of what we say, having to spell something was only a matter of time. Yet it’s tremendously useful and fun to say things to her and be understood. Ah, mixed blessings. Next thing you know she’ll come out with full sentences we can understand. She has quite a temper (I can’t imagine where she got that) and will “cuss us out” with sentence length stings of various syllables in a range she normally doesn’t exhibit. We joke about her being in trouble if we knew what she was saying.