I know, I know - parents too often credit their children with phenomenal accomplishments. "My kid was walking at 3 weeks!" "Oh yeah? Well mine had her dissertation done before we cut the cord!" So I won't claim that Sophie knows how to read yet, because obviously she doesn't. But it seems like she's making some steps towards it. I'll try to report the facts, as a purely impartial observer.
Sophie has about 20 books out from the library right now, ranging from 'single word per page' to 'reasonably complex story and dialogue'. She brought me one of the simple ones, and proceeded to read it to me, from the name of the book, all the way through, saying each word as we came to it: banana, spoon, cracker, bottle, yummy, messy. All well and good, she's seeing the pictures and remembering the word. This has been going on for some time. So we went through it again, me using my hand to cover up the key part of the picture. No problem, she still says the word. (And pointing at the word, saying "that says bottle".) So I go through in random order. Still no problem. Then I get another book from Holly to totally cover up the pictures.
Still no problem. By this time, I'm getting impressed, but Holly figures she's associating the background colours of the pages with the words on them. So we type the words into the word processor, blow them up huge, and see if Sophie can still read them with no contextual clues. She gets the first one, "yummy". We're amazed. She then proceeds to miss all the rest, either saying "no not", or misidentify them as possibly "yummy". But as soon as we go back to "yummy", she gets it.
So, what to do? Do we count her first read word as "yummy"? Or do we need some more scientific method to make a positive identification? We're probably just overdoing things as stupidly proud parents, so we'll probably need some third party officiant.
