This weekend we got to celebrate Zak finishing his BA and our friend, Tracie, finishing her master's degree by going CAMPING!! We haven't been since I was very newly pregnant with Koa (I specifically remember the timing because we hadn't told anyone we were having a baby yet, and Neil Narmore patted my belly and told me I needed to "suck it in!" He's SO lucky I have a good sense of humor!). So, I feel a little bad that we have waited this long to take Koa on his first camping trip, but he didn't seem to hold it against us. The only problem with doing it for just a weekend is that the packing and clean up take almost as long (or longer) than the actual event! So, this week will be detox week as I spend days finding ways to get the sand out of everything we own--even the things we didn't take with us!
We spent the weekend at Bellows camping with about 40 friends. Those of you who know Bellows know that at this time of year you can't really spend more than a day there without getting rained on at some point. That part of the weekend came Sunday, right in the middle of our beach church service and right before we were to pack up and leave. So, that means we get to set up the tent again this week to let it dry and clean it lest it should be wrought with mildew the next time we get the chance to use it! We scoff at those friends who left before the rain and call them pansies on the World Wide Web!
However, Saturday we had a beautiful day to play on the beach after we hunted for and found a great deal of firewood for a fantastic fire in the evening. It was really a perfect day to be at the beach! We also got a pretty good Ultimate Frisbee game in the afternoon and finished up in time to cook dinner and be joined for the meal by many more members of our church ohana. We grilled out and then spent some time singing around the campfire before we roasted marshmallows and had s'mores! Nothin' like a good sugar high before you go to bed!
We discovered this weekend that Koa is a great camper! He loved having all that wide open space to wander and visit from tent to tent with all of his aunties and uncles. In addition to all the friends being at the ready, he had balls and Frisbees and sticks to play with at will! That child was in heaven. The most amazing part was that when it was time to go to sleep we would show him to his little pallet on the floor of our tent and he would go right to sleep. I guess we just wore him out well enough during his awake hours!
Another discovery we made this past week is that Koa knows most of the letters of the alphabet. He can't say "the ABC's", but he actually recognizes the letters by sight and sound. We thought he just knew "H" and "W" because once in a while we would hear him point it out or when his lap top would ask him to identify one of the letters he would get it right and we would think, "Oh, that's funny, he coincidentally pushed the right letter at the right time." Then one day last week I started asking him to identify the letters in ABC order by pointing at them. He got about half of them right. So, we thought that was pretty interesting. Then we set his laptop to a program where it shows a letter on the screen and gives an audible prompt to push the corresponding letter. He was wandering around the room playing with other toys, but each time he would hear the prompt he would come over and push the button and sometimes he would finger-sign the letter, too. Every once in a while he would pause and look at the screen first and sometimes he would get a letter confused with a similar looking letter (for instance he would confuse R and B) but the majority of the time he got it right. Zak and I just sat there wide eyed wondering when this had happened.
A day or two later we were sitting at the pharmacy (FOREVER) and Koa started pointing out the letters on the digital signs. So, to keep him occupied for part of the two hours that we were there, I would write letters and have him identify them. He got most of them right that day. I didn't do it for very long because I felt weird quizzing a two year old (almost) on his letters in public. Today he started taking an interest in the fact that the letters have sounds and wanted to do the activity on his laptop that informs him of the letter's sound. He usually doesn't like to do the same activity the whole time. He generally will only use the "challenge yourself" button where the computer randomly picks an activity for you out of the 30 different choices. Most of them he can't do, but until last week I thought there was only one he could do and he had no interest in that one. What do I know? I'm just the mom!
We think it's pretty cool that he can identify his letters, but mostly we just love to see him getting so excited about learning. I hope we can continue to encourage that mentality! I figure in the long run that is much more important than when he learned his letters!
I've been thinking I need to blog about this before all of his funny little words disappear into big boy words. He's already starting to enunciate some of his baby words a little better. For instance, this week he added an "r" to "mo'e" so now it is much easier to distinguish "more, more" from "mo-mo" which is his word for any person who works in landscaping. For some reason he has also added an extra "r" to "straw" changing it from "stee-raw" to "strawr".
