1, 2, 3...

Samantha is definitely getting herself ready for school. I had wanted to wait until I had some video of her before I posted this, but either I can't get the video camera together in time and she refuses to "perform on demand", or the video camera's not charged. At any rate, I'm sitting here after having put her in bed for the night, listening to her talking to herself and her toys in her crib. And I'm listening to her count from 1 to 10. I love this. She does it with us, she does it by herself, she does it whenever she sees something that needs counting--like the dirty clothes she pulls out of her laundry basket at the foot of her bed. She's been doing this now for about a month, and her pronounciation has been getting better and better. She still only says part of the words (like "s" for six and "ta" for 8), but we know what she means, and she sure does. Lastnight she sat in my mother's lap while she read her a book, and part way through, Samantha grabbed my mom's hand and began to count each of her fingers.

We started her on her ABCs a couple of weeks ago, and she's doing really well with that, too. She repeats each letter after us and sometimes says them on her own. Steve bought a set of Sesame Street alphabet flash cards, and she's begun to recognize the letters on paper, too.

Oh, I have a little gripe to put in here. We still haven't heard anything from the school about what we need to know/do/prepare for school. Actually, we hadn't even heard any kind of confirmation about the start date, either, until I e-mailed her teacher the other day. He responded that they start back to school on the 25th and would send communication by the 27th (including questionnaires about Sammi's likes, dislikes, words, etc.), when school starts on the 2nd! That doesn't seem to give us much time. I assume she'll need a backpack, so I was proactive and got her one of those already. I don't know if she's supposed to bring her lunch, or if they'll be eating school food. We don't know anything about the bus she's supposed to take to school yet (of course Steve will drive her the first day/week/year). I was also proactive and started to create a spreadsheet of Samantha's words, but that quickly started to get tedious. It's a pretty extensive list. I guess we'll figure it all out as we go...