Brady graduated to preschool a few weeks ago, and now we write a weekly journal for him to help his teachers craft activities for him during the week. I’ll post these here when I write them. This week’s follows. Bear in mind this is written for the preschool teachers.

Susan went out of town for several days, the longest Brady has ever been separated from her. He spent time with Dad and his sister Laura. We talked about airplanes, looked at pictures of them in Richard Scary books, packed our own suitcases at home, pretended to fly a plane to daycare when we drove in in the mornings, and comforted ourselves with a line from Daniel Tiger, ‘Grownups come back!’

We also pretended our couch was an airplane and flew it off to Atlanta where mom was. This has transmogrified into a game where we pretend to drive a bus, and take his stuffed animals to their homes, visit our relatives, and go to various places he likes. Dad drives and Brady is the ‘copilot,’ whose duties include paying tolls, shooing cows, cats, and other animals out of the ‘road,’ paying for gas, and applying the turn signals. Now he wants to play this constantly.

We try lots of different kinds of music for Brady, and this week he’s been most fond of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ which has a passage he recites a lot (‘the piper will lead us to reason’), and Mumford and Sons’s album ‘Babel,’ which we sort of suspect he likes just because of the album’s name 😉

Brady helped me fix a door on the chicken coop which blew off in high winds, which was an opportunity for him to practice hammering. He hammered in his first nails.

We went for a family walk across the dam at the Quabbin, where we saw the big lake and the dam and talked about what dams are and how they keep the water from going where we don’t want it to.

We discovered that it can be great fun to setup long runs of dominoes, with towers and different shapes laid down on the floor, then have Brady set them to tumbling over. We then combined this with wooden building blocks and various balls, and have been building ever more elaborate rube goldberg contraptions. This requires lots of patience from Brady and he’s been doing great with it. Of course he loves the ‘everything falls down’ aspect of this best.

Brady’s just beginning to show the ability to actually count things. He can recite numbers up through 20 or so somewhat reliably, but only in the last week or so can you point out a collection of things and have him count them off one by one, using his finger to pick out each object. Success is still iffy, but he’s made the mental connection now.