Little Rain Man

Sawyer is totally obsessed with numbers, letters, and shapes! He is pretty amazing with them too! He can count over 100, count backwards from 20 without ever missing, and can even count by 10s. He sings the alphabet song forwards AND backwards and not only knows the letters by site, but the sound each one makes as well. He can spend half an hour just looking at a catalogue because of all the numbers and letters! With shapes, the only thing he has left to master are the 2D ones. Everywhere we go he's looking for numbers, letters, and shapes. He reads books about them, plays with them, traces them, and we even have all kinds of made-up songs about them. Last time we took him to the pool, we couldn't even get him in the water because he wanted to walk back and forth counting the numbers on the pool lanes.

I have had a couple of friends ask me if I've considered having him tested, but seriously for the longest time I was concerned he might have some kind of autism! It was almost scary what he could do when he was only 2 years old. He's 2 1/2 now and fortunately he has branched out to cars, and guys, and other kinds of pretend that have helped omit the worry that he was the next Rain Man. Instead I'm happy knowing that he's just a normal kid with a really big fascination for number, letters, and shapes. Who knows, maybe he is some kind of genius, but I'm pretty happy to just let him be a little boy and sing good-night to numbers 1-20 every night!

Above: Tracing numbers I wrote for him. Below: Writing numbers himself!







He loves these blocks. He can turn the numbers any way and tell you the number that they make together. He's also recently into this finger up the nose business!