Mental Leaps

Every once in a while Keegan starts making some mental leaps.  It seems like in a couple weeks he starts doing things that he wasn't doing earlier, not gradually but in a leap type of thing.

I know developmentally they say children will make cognitive leaps throughout their childhood; supposedly this can leave them cranky and out of sorts for a while.

Well we have been going through a bit of this.  The last week or so Kee has been one cranky little boy...but he also started doing some interesting things.

1) Lyle and I can no longer spell words that we don't want Keegan to hear.  For example I said "Lyle don't forget Keegan needs a B-A-T-H tonight."  Keegan says "Mom I know I need a bath, I just don't want one."

Or I say "Keegan wants some C-A-N-D-Y after dinner, is that okay with you?" Keegan replies "I get to have candy after dinner?"

The same thing has happened with the word Santa, now Lyle and I have to spell it backwards in order to talk about Tanas's presents."

2) Coloring and drawing.  Keegan was the king of scribbles.  He would make a vortex of scribbles and call it a volcano.  Today at Green Mill he flipped over his paper placemat grabbed a red crayon and drew a very clear volcano with lava blasting out the top.  Then he drew something over the lava and something down the side of the volcano.  I pointed to the volcano and asked if the read stuff was lava inside...Keegan said "No mom, it's magma...geez.  The stuff coming out of the top is lava.  The cloud over the lava is the ash cloud and the stuff going down the side is the pyroclastic flow (seriously he knows what a pyroclastic flow is)."  I was blown away!  In a week we went from scribbles to detailed diagrams of volcanoes.

3) Dexterity.  Up to this point Keegan has needed assistance with Legos.  He is way young to be playing with them anyway, but he enjoys them so we help him put together stuff he can't do.  Then on Thursday night the item out of the Lego Advent Calendar was a skeleton with these tiny ball socket joints for his arms.  I was having a devil of a time getting it together.  Keegan took it from me and snapped it together in 2 seconds and then handed it back "Here mom, I got it."  I was like "Uh, okay...when did you learn how to do that?"

4)  Money. As I think I detailed in a earlier entry, a couple months ago Keegan asked for chores so that he could make money of his own.  Today he asked if he could count the money he's made so far.  He wanted to take it to Target and maybe get a toy with it.  He was kind of sad that he's done all this work and has nothing but money to show for it.  Lyle and I are all about teaching him to save, but at his age he also needs to equate his hard work with reward (because face it I wouldn't go to work if I didn't get money and was able to use the money for things I like).  So we decided he could take the money and go to Target.  Keegan was surprisingly mature about it.  We told him how much money he had and he looked at a ton of different toys always asking how much they were.  When something he wanted was more money then he had he didn't whine, he just put it back on the shelf.  We explained he could save up his money and get it later, but he wanted something special today.  So he looked until he found a couple smaller things he had been wanting.  He was very pleasant about the whole thing and it really impressed me.

I am sure there are other things he has done that I just can't think of now.  For example he has started becoming more concerned of what people think of him; which is interesting too.  He is kind of hard on himself about certain things.  When he brought home a paper of letters he had traced I praised how good they all looked and he immediately pointed out all the ones he thought looked bad.  When he brought home a colored picture and I said how  much I liked it and put it on the fridge, he wanted to take it down because he said it was too scribbly and it looked like a baby had done it.  (It's still on the fridge anyway, because I like it and I think he should be proud of it).  I hope he is not too hard on himself in the future; but I know I was always very hard on myself so it's not too surprising he's like that...  

Anyway it is interesting to see him grow :-)  He is developing into a very interesting and capable individual!