This Guy's Pretty Amazing

 Our five year old has been making some pretty huge leaps in ability lately.  He put together a 24 piece puzzle today with just a little help - simple statements from me like - "Can you find part of Eeyore?"  "Turn it around."

I took him and his little brother to the library tonight while the nine year old had a 4H meeting.  The meetings are only an hour long and we live out of town a ways, so it didn't make sense to drive home and then back again in such a short time.  (By the way, I would have LOVED to get pictures from 4H tonight. The nine year old did a presentation on wildlife art and illustrated/guided the group to draw an elk.  But he banished me.  He thought he would be too nervous with me watching.)

Back to the point.  Our library is awesome. Along with books and computers, they have a dress-up box, megablocks, oversized plastic tinker toys, puzzles, and an art table.  I was busy reading right next to where they were coloring, and looked up to see how amazingly well he had done his picture.

I seriously did a double-take.

This is the best job he's ever done staying in the lines.  Usually he doesn't even try to stay in the lines.  This is a kid who can only write the first letter of his name, and who wouldn't be able to draw a smiley face if you asked him to.  I couldn't even get him to pick up a pencil until his 4th birthday.  But wow!  And to stick with the project as long as he did... wow.

The other night I was reading to him as I do most nights.  This book is titled Bats At The Library. He's very interesting with his books.  He loves to have me read to him, but usually it's just one book.  Then he'll become fixated on that book either for that night or several days.  He studies the pictures and will tote the book around all evening (or week).  And he can re-tell the story almost perfectly even after only hearing it once.

What surprised me the other night was that he brought me the book, opened to this page, and asked me what made the shadow.  I am so impressed that he noticed it was a shadow and wondered about it enough to ask.  The shadow was made by a projector - an ancient relic these days.  No wonder it didn't make sense to him.

I had to include this picture because it was too cute not to.  You might think he's telling me not to take his picture, but you'd be wrong.  He told me, "Take a picture of my hand."  We had to do the other hand too :)

This is totally unrelated, but I thought it was interesting (ha - maybe that's just me though).  When we went to the library, I took the book I'm currently reading along - The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.  (I'm only two chapters into it but it is so well written I know it is going to be great.)  I had one other book I wanted to grab while I was there, and as it always happens, I ended up grabbing five instead.  The interesting thing to me though was that the whole stack of books is white.  Odd.  I don't think that's happened to me before.

So yeah, I'm probably the only one who finds that noteworthy.  I came home and added these 5 library books to my shelf of the 20 (yes, literally 20 - I counted) library books I already have.  Then I obsessively arranged them in rainbow color order. I've seen those beautiful bookselves on pinterest that are arranged like a rainbow. All I can say is that they must be buying the books only for the color they are.

Most of mine are white. The new ones don't fit on the shelf I have set aside for library books because I haven't returned the January reads yet - have to get a picture at the end of the month before I return them.  I have a few reds and a surprising number of yellow/oranges and two that are sort of a mint green, but that's pretty much it.  I'm feeling a great deal of pressure to look for blue and purple books when I go to the library tomorrow :)

It has just occurred to me that my daughter will appreciate these pictures as she is just as obsessed with things like this as I am.  I think I will forever be arranging my library book shelf by color.  I probably won't extend that plan to the rest of the million books we have though. I can see it now, "Honey, do you remember what color that book was?" HA. We'd never find anything. Hmmm or maybe we would.  I usually do remember what color a book is...