Rainy week in Austin

Thanks to Tropical Storm Hermine, which dumped about a foot of water at our house, we spent most of the last week stuck inside. On top of that, Carter was a bit wheezy at the beginning of the week, so we couldn't really go to any indoor activities either. I decided it was a good time to start breaking out some paints and things.



Finger painting is fun!



I bought a book a while back called First Art, and it's a great source of ideas for art projects for toddlers. It also has a lot of recipes for homemade paint, though we haven't tried any of those yet. I have plenty of the pre-made washable Crayola kind to last us a while. I've been flipping through it and trying some of the ideas, and Carter really seems to enjoy it.

It was Friday before we got to go back out again. We went to a toy store and hung out for a while on Friday afternoon, and Carter surprised me by making a friend, a little boy who seemed to be about a year older than him. They played together and talked and everything, and it was the first time I've ever seen him actually interact with a child his age. Until now he's only really interacted with adults and older kids, and has completely ignored kids his own age. In the last few days he's gone out of his way to try to interact with other little kids, and it's such a change! It's just one more way that he's growing up.

Something I have yet to get on video is Carter singing and playing along with songs on TV. There are lots of kid shows with people singing and dancing, and he will very often run to pick up his guitar or keyboard and start playing and singing along. He'll often direct us to play too, saying, "Mommy play the harmonica! Daddy play the drum!" It's like he wants us to be a little band, and it's really fun!

He says things every day that completely surprise me. For example, yesterday he was playing a harmonica and he brought it over to me and said, "Put it to the mouth and make the blue sound." He said it a few more times, and we finally concluded that he'd seen a harmonica associated with the blues on one of the many music shows he watches.

Doug went on a business trip to Spain, and Carter thought he was going to space, and kept saying, "Daddy go to space on a rocket ship!" I reminded him a few times that Daddy was actually in Spain, and Carter started saying "outer Spain" instead. He told someone at the park today that his daddy was in Spain, and the guy looked at him funny. It occurs to me that I will likely get a call from a teacher one day about Carter's tall tales about all the places he's been, and I'll have to explain to the teacher that Carter is actually telling the truth. :-P

After being really interested in learning his ABCs a year ago, Carter lost all interest until recently, and now he's interested in things reading-related again. One of the really cool things he's doing is associating letters with sounds, and he does it without prompting. He'll look at a word and will make the sound of the first letter, and then try to use other clues to figure out what the word is. I've tried to take advantage of his interest to start working on two-letter sound combinations, like tr and st, along with short phonetically-pronounced words like go, car, stop, red, and so on. He points to the words in his books as he recites the words from memory, so he definitely understands the concept of reading. Hopefully he'll remain interested, and we can make some more progress!

Finally, here's a picture from the other day that's kind of blurry, but still cute.



Hopefully I'll have more pictures to post next time!