Brilliant!

Emily has really started to take off with some academic skills that I didn't expect to see this early.  Here's what my smart little girl is doing:

- She is developing number correspondence (the understanding that X toys is that NUMBER of toys...for instance, when she is counting a set of objects, she gets the right number and doesn't just SAY all the numbers she knows).  Anyway, yesterday she counted objects up to NINE...which is pretty impressive considering a week ago she was only doing it to 3 or 4 correctly.

- She is becoming very aware of the world around us.  Whenever she hears a noise it's, "What was that sound, Mommy?"  and I have to explain it to her.  Or in the car she is constantly yelling out about what she sees- right now she loves all kinds of vehicles- especially dump trucks and semi trucks.  She goes REALLY wild for school buses.  She is also counting what she sees-- she'll tell me, "Look Mommy-- 2 dump trucks!"  She gets so excited and wants me to notice every single thing with her.

- She is starting to show some interest in learning to write letters....so, we're teaching her.  The thing about Emily, though, is that you only have to show her once or twice and whatever you taught is LOCKED in.  For example, she has learned to write the letters E, I, and H (trying to teach "easier" letters without curves since her fine motor control isn't perfect).  She will gladly draw these letters for you whenever you ask...and we only demonstrated how to draw them a few times! 

- Also related to drawing, she is drawing happy faces everywhere now.  She loves it!  Yesterday she drew one (and then erased it before I could take a picture!) that had eyes, a nose, ears, colored-in cheeks, and arms!  ARMS!  I was so impressed.  This is definitely more of a 3 year old skill and she's still 4 months away from that so I was pretty proud of her!

Anyway, I wanted to be sure I wrote all this down so we have an idea about how she is developing.  We are so excited to see her learning all these new things!