Slowly learning to read

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.

That says penguin!

I was just reading "Animals" to Sophie as her 2nd choice bedtime book ("I Love Animals" is currently MIA, let me know if you know where it is!). She was happily identifying the animal on each page, and then she switched to pointing at the words and saying, "That says kitty!", "That says macaw!", "That says elephant!" etc. I love watching her learn!

Edited to add: At 9:15, I found "I Love Animals" hiding under the large brown armchair. It was too late for tonight, but at least I have the pleasure of knowing exactly where that liiiibary book is now.

They're from the Liiiiiiiiibary!

Sophie's gets most of her books from our local library, one of her favourite spots in the world. Currently, she has 39 books checked out, 24 of which are overdue. We're off to the library after naptime to remedy this situation. However, I thought I'd share a few of her favourite titles from this last round of borrowing as a snapshot of Sophie's literary tastes.

Sophie's first impulse buy

The other day, Dean took Sophie grocery shopping and gave her a basket to carry to keep her amused. As soon as she got to the produce section, she marched up to the potato display and added one to her basket. Our little girl made her first impulse buy! And it cost us a grand total of 51 cents.
(p.s. this photo was a set up so I could blog about the famous potato and Sophie had just finished a drink, so that's why she's sporting a milk moustache)

Sophie's new bed

We are slowly but surely making some changes that will lead to Sophie having her own room sometime in the next few months. This week, we said goodbye (& good riddance!) to the 11-year-old pull-out couch and hello to Dean's childhood bed. Sophie hasn't slept on the bed yet (we still need to get side rails), but she's taken to it. I was in the living room and looked over to see this scene earlier today. She's such a big girl now!

Extreme accent

Sophie seems to have picked up quite the accent somewhere. It seems excessively Canadian, or even Scottish in some way. It's only with certain words though, words with the "ow" sound in them, like couch. She pronounces it "oo", like "cooch". I had only noticed this in passing until one day when she really drew attention to it while sitting in her highchair after a meal: "Soophie doown, want to boonce on the cooch!"

Sophie's Valentine's question for you

Will you be mine?