Training Log Archive: TinyFeet

I am nearly finished in the Twos room now, and will be starting preschool. I am in many ways "too big for the Twos room" but in other ways I am the same person that I was at the start of the year (and in other ways I am "too little"). Dumping leaves from my dump truck, for example, is still the best game ever. There have been so many good things this year. Like the giant roller/auger/loader that beeps that Sarah found in her aunt's attic, and that the Twos room teachers liked so much that they made an exception for the no-toys-with-batteries rule. I was a bit scared by the batteries but my little sister adored it and chased it round the Twos Room until she was waylaid by pulling herself up on a shopping cart and then toppled over. Mum is having difficulty conveying what a force of nature my little sister is, so I will have to help too.

For instance. Today mum and Babysister* went to the library. Mum thought she'd fallen asleep on the walk there, because the kicking under the stroller sheet stopped about 5 blocks from home. But suddenly there was a rustle and a "peekaboo!" Other babies go to the library to read books, but my little sister goes to crawl around on the floor, climb through the bookshelves, and play with the other little people. When I say play with, if they are climbable, she climbs. If they are too big, she sits next to them. If they are playing with the train set, she stares at them and tries to grab the pieces when they aren't watching. Her new friend Svetlana** who is a month younger sits back and watches her and occasionally tries to follow her.

She is a babysister of good temperament and breeding and (thankfully) loves trucks. Her fine motor control i pretty awesome and she can drive them around. Her current favourite book with mum is Red Truck, but the gorilla book form the library was also pretty good. She read it 3 times straight through, then kept reading it but getter one fewer page through each time, with the page turns becoming faster and faster. Svetlana and her mum had never seen a book read like that. I wonder how they read books.


*poppet, poppetalita, poppetina, poppetaloppeta; the last does the best at conveying her personality.
** not her real name

I am researching my babysister's vocabulary. She keeps forgetting words so it's a bit hard to keep track.

rɔ [rock]
bye bye
hi
dada [mum, dad]
dadad [David] - yes, a minimal pair with coda distinction
wu [woof]
botu [bottle] - yes, nonhomorganic consonants.
mo [more]
all done.

Animal noises: roar (like my, she thinks penguins roar as well as lions and tigers and polar bears), ɬɬɬ (lateral fricative) for snakes.

A few indescribable to modern phonetics sounds, like the bibblebibble noise made with my fingers against my lips, and the blahblahblah one where the blade of my tongue makes contact with my gums and top lip.

She's forgotten bird and dog and a few others.

C • also yeah no ba [ball] ba [... 1

Mum and TFLS went to water one of mum's colleagues lawns today. That was a big adventure. We parked in a new driveway and got out into the carrier, and got to stick feet and hands in the hose spray for a bit. Then that got a bit boring but mum put me down, and I crawled all over their dandelion and clover free lawn and pronounced it an A+ crawling surface. Pity about the lack of clover flowers in the lawn though, I like them. Then mum held the hose spray enticingly and I crawled into it for a bit, which was lovely until I realised that I was all wet! And that was terrible! So I fell apart for a bit until I had some milk and a cuddle. So then I sat in my car seat in the driveway and chewed on some plastic keys while mum finished up the watering.

C • commented on to note that t... 1

Reading Haakon's log reminded mum that little babies have lots of time to log their training, but toddlers do interesting things too. But that's all she has time for.