Favorite Things

1. The lawn mower.  I’ve mentioned this in several recent posts, so I’m not going to write too much about it, but because its one of Nathan’s most favorite toys I needed to mention it here.  We always love playing with it inside, but as soon as we go outside, it must come out with us too.  Its also very important for it to get parked before naps and bedtimes; these days the designated spot is  always beside the TV in the living room along with the zoom-zoom (ride on toy) and his wagon.  When spoken about, Nathan always calls it “my nu-nu” and Daddy’s lawn mower is “Dada my nu-nu.”

2. The “colors game".  One of Nathan’s presents from Christmas last year was a set of 2-piece puzzles of matching colors and/or textures.  For example, one side of the puzzle would be a square of pink and the matching piece would be a pink pig.  A few weeks (months?) ago I decided to start using the puzzle pieces as flash cards to teach Nathan his colors.  We started with just three colors and have now worked our way through the whole set, including gray, black, white and “rainbow sunshine” (for the rainbow).  For a while Nathan would always get certain colors confused (like red and green or blue and yellow), but most of the time now he can rattle them off no problem.
From there we progressed to showing him two different colors and asking him to point out which one was ______.  And now we are using them as the 2 piece puzzles they were designed as.  I’ll lay out four cards (two matching sets) and he picks the two that are the “same color” and tries to fit the pieces together.  Every time we play his motor skills get better and he is now able to put the pieces together by himself most times.

3. Family photos on the fridge.  This was a little project that I’ve had in mind for a long time and finally finished about a week ago.  I printed out pictures of all the family that Nathan’s met and put them in plastic sleeves on the fridge at his eye level.  He spends quite a bit of time looking at the pictures, or rearranging the pictures, or naming everyone in the pictures. 



4. His tape measure.  Though he loves playing with any tool, especially the real ones, his favorite thing to do is measure various objects around the house with his tape measure.  For a while he was concentrating mostly on his lawn mower, but really he’ll be content to measure almost anything!