David Weekly, #58

This has been a very fast moving week. Doesn't seem like a whole lot happened.

Last Saturday we went to Mimi's (my mom), and played with Avery and Jared for a couple of hours. Sunday we went to Nature's Classroom, an outdoor educational facility for all the 6th grade students in Hillborough County. The thing is, they opened to the public (for the first time ever, I think), probably for Earth Day. So David and I went with Mimi and Jared and Avery. It was a lot of fun. There's a board walk that we went on, saw some deer, walked through a cypress dome, and did a few other activities. Notably, David had an encounter with an alligator. Of course, this reptile was small, about 18 inches long, and was well controlled by a handler, and a small cage. He didn't want to touch it even when he was told he could...but he did eventually touch its tail. We spent the rest of Sunday just playing at home, throwing around a ball.

We went to the green park on Thursday, and he wanted to go on the boardwalk there, which runs along the river. On this boardwalk, many of the planks are engraved with people's names, which celebrate their births, or their lives, or an anniversary, so he's looking for W's in the names he sees on the planks, and sees the name WILL, spelling it out loud. He interprets the second letter as an L until he gets to the next letter, and then updates the interpretation as "I" instead...very good that he did that. He is asking me to spell all kinds of things now.

Another thing that was funny about going the park is this statement: "Daddy, we have a problem," he says to me very seriously. "There aren't any kids here." For him, having kids at the park is important.

David likes to stand still, like statue. He poses, usually in a very unnatural pose, and says, "Look, I'm a statue." The pose is frequently him standing, with one hand over his eye, and the other hand up, palm facing outward. Sometimes he'll stand on one leg. I have no idea where this comes from, but it's pretty funny.

Friday we went to a very different park than he's used to: a nature preserve. We went to the Brooker Creek Preserve, and walked along the boardwalk there. We saw two different armadillos in the brush. Those things are loud, so easy to find when they make noise. David was amazed at how quiet it was out there. I explained that this is not a play park, but a nature park. They also have a learning center that shows the watershed for that area, and lots of different things showing the water cycle and such, most of this is too advanced for him, but he had fun making things light up, and walking/running around the center, sitting the chairs that overlook some of the preserve. And then we had lunch at McDonald's. He did very well, sitting still eating his hamburger, drinking his milk...stealing a couple of my chicken nuggets.

Last thing: David's beginning to read things, and he doesn't even realize he's doing it. Granted, it's by sight that he knows what he's seeing, rather than the traditional knowing what each letter or combination of letters says to make up the word, but it's getting to that point. He will often make up what a certain set of words says. Interestingly, he gets the meaning of it right a good portion of the time. He knows there's meaning behind not just the words, but also in their context.

Hope you have a good week.

Rusty