Reading Successes

I started reading to Katy months ago.  At first, she showed zero interest.  I read while Katy crawled away, looked away, babbled over me, or did anything else she could to show her lack of interest.  Undeterred, I kept reading.  A few weeks before her first birthday, Katy started sitting with me as I read to her.  By her first birthday, we were reading books by the stacks, sometimes at Katy's insistence.  I was excited Katy had finally taken to reading, even if I suspected her interest was  really in turning the pages and having my undivided attention. 

      

Katy recently began pointing to pictures in her books while I read and up until yesterday, I thought the pointing was random.  Yesterday, however, Katy and I were reading an ABC book with a story about a dog who wants to eat some freshly baked apple pie.  There is a different picture for each letter depicting the dog's attempt to eat the pie, with some of the pictures side by side.   As were reading, Katy was studying a page showing two different pictures of the dog, one a close up of the dog's face and the other a zoomed out picture of the dog next to a piece of furniture.  As Katy studied the pictures, she began pointing between the dog's face in the close up and the dog in the zoomed out picture.  Testing whether this was coincidence, I turned to the beginning of the book and asked Katy, "where is the dog" or "donde esta el perro?"  On every page of the book, Katy pointed to the dog.  She recognized that although the dogs are slightly different in each picture, they are still the same thing. 

I don't plan to write about each one of Katy's seemingly small accomplishments, but I had to write about her purposeful pointing because (1) I'm so excited that Katy continues to take an interest in reading, (2) it exemplifies the explosion in cognitive developments that have taken place over the last couple of months, and (3) this is why having a baby is so amazing!  Before I had Katy, I wanted a tiny, soft baby of my own to hold and cuddle.  I didn't think past the baby phase, and I certainly had no idea how amazing it would be to watch a baby develop from a blob into an interactive, thinking, learning, and moving being.  The Apple Pie book we were reading yesterday is one of Katy's favorites.  She frequently brings this book to me to read and sometimes asks to read it several times in a row.  For weeks, we read this book over and over and over with seemingly no reaction from Katy.  But then one day, Katy showed me that she was making unseen connections, every so slowly, little by little, as we read this book.  Moments like this are so incredibly rewarding because they seem so sudden and yet they make me realize they were weeks in the making.  

  

Today, while reading a touch-and-feel book about animals wearing hats, Katy first pointed to the touch-and-feel portion of the hat-only images and then pointed to the same part of the hat on separate pictures of the animals wearing the hats.  Seriously, this girl is on a roll, and I don't think things are going to slow down anytime soon.