Jonathan is improving daily in his ability to learn by heart and remember. It’s really amazing to see his cognitive abilities and his logic developing. Weather he tells me a story, sings a song or recognizes letters the magic is a combination of seeing him improve as well as witnessing his true enjoyment in his discoveries and achievements.
Watching Jonathan at the playground is pure joy. He improves and climbs higher each time. He is strong and his movements become smoother, so I have nothing to fear. He demands my attention because he likes that I climb and play with him – I never was the kind of mom to sit down in a playground. We were enjoying a break on the swings when a woman began to rock a baby nearby and to sing to it. Jonathan simply joined her in song. He sings the tune correctly and gets a lot of the sounds even if he does not get the words.
He demonstrated the same”sing song” and learning by heart by “reading” a story to me at bedtime. He took the book, recognized the picture and the scene represented in it and he started telling me the story instead of my reading it to him.
Jonathan’s reading ability is even more amazing, he recognizes letters on a keyboard. He has a DVD disk that entails the Hebrew alphabet and each letter is represented with some and cute characters. He looked at my laptop, pointed to 3 certain letters and sang the correct song from the DVD to match each letter. I am certain that if I thought him the letters names he would get them to in a short while. Although his speech has much to be desired for his age, he is able to naturally switch from Hebrew to German, depending to which parent he is talking and his vocabulary in both languages is growing, so we are not concerned. After all children growing up with two languages have twice as much information to learn. So in an “absolute” number of words, Jonathan is doing well. It’s nice to see him switch the languages so naturally, it would seam he has inherited his mothers talent.
His love of music and DVD takes the boy also to higher cultural themes – such as the Disney cartoon of “Peter and the Wolf”. Jonathan loves the short film and the music (original Prokofiev). Recently he has taken to singing the tunes (he especially loves the wolf and the bird) and as he sings he walks like the character – arms high to enlarge himself and teeth bared for the wolf and hopping about and waving with his hands for the bird. As he sings these classical tunes in the street I am proud to be walking by such a cultural little boy… not that I can walk for long – he wants me to join in the game and soon I am singing and walking like a wolf too.
His love of animals has not abated and he loves to recognize them and make sounds. He can do so in Hebrew and German very well. To card pictures, books and coloring pages we have now added the computer, Yep! My boy has joined the multimedia generation. All kindergartens support a computer today. He already holds the mouse correctly and delicately, as if born to it. The keyboard is another story – he just bangs it and waits to see which key will make the computer do something. The children’s games are based on lack of keyboard knowledge and so Jonathan can switch between animal cartoons and make animal sounds in front of the screen, banging at the keyboard to his heart’s content. I dedicated an old computer and an old keyboard to his use, so I am speared the heartache of seeing good equipment ruined and abuse by children.
The bad side of Jonathan’s cognitive improvement is the fact that I can no longer make him happy as easily. If it as once relatively easy to turn his interest to something else when crying, to distract him or to even bribe him in order to achieve a certain point, it is now harder. He is more independent, harder to stop or control when he wishes something (he just gets a chair, opens the freezer, positions the chair and takes the ice cream, so putting it higher up is not longer as effective, or he just turns on the TV and puts a DVD for himself with no need of assistance, like in the past) and the negotiation with him for his attention and obedience is becoming more sophisticated. He is also regretfully learning to throw a tantrum. This feature was simply not in his arsenal when he was smaller and now going to bed is a fight because the combination of not getting his will (to continue watching "The Simpsons" – his favorite new DVD series) and being literally exhausted simply brings out the worst of tantrums. The bottle is in many ways still our savior because it calms him down – so even though he never needed a pacifier he is “pushing 3 years of age” I am hanging on to the baby bottles as a mean of pacifying him. I am not concerned with this because I like to drink form a water bottle even today and the way I see it eventually we will simply change his bottles to more grown up formats. Until then, he may continue to enjoy the privilege of suckling on a baby bottle and I get relative peace and quiet.
But I must end on a positive note. His memory is also improving and Jonathan is showing very sweet connections between things. I recently changed the carton in which his DVD’s are placed. The older carton was just too small and tearing at the edges. The older carton however found a new destiny. Jonathan is being potty trained. He wears diapers only at nights and underwear in the day time. He has gotten the part of peeing in a “small toilet” chair like potty, but the bulkier stuff he still does in his pants… As he likes to choose which diaper to wear every night (selecting them according to animal images Pampers pit on the front), I opened the package and placed the diapers in the carton that used to be the DVD carton. Today, Jonathan recognized the old box and immediately emptied it of the diapers and took it back to the living room and returned all the DVD’s into their “right” box- tidying up, correcting the mistaken use of the box (he is a boy who likes his things in their place and remembers where to find them). It was nice to see that even though the new arrangement is already a few days old, he remembers the old box correctly. I later returned things back to their new place and I hope he will accept the new order.
His manners are those of a natural German. He always says “thank you” when you give him something and “please” when he gives you something (which is the Hebrew way of saying you are welcome to what ever it is that is being given you) nicely. He forgets to say “please” when asking for something because he is still demanding, but that we trust will improve with time. The kindergarten teachers say he is always putting things nicely away, that he is sweet tempered and obedient and even I have heard him say “bless you” to me when I sneeze of cough in his presence. To sum it up – everyone agrees he is just a cute little boy! A sweety!
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