Within the last couple of weeks Samuel has begun to exhibit a strong interest in letters, words and spelling. It began with his preschool placemat. Every night at dinner time he would point to each photo of a student with their parent and ask about the letters in their names. As the nights went on, he started naming the letters in each name, and within a few days he was associating the sound with each letter. We've begun the adventure into sounding out words.
Yesterday I asked Teacher Rachel for some curriculum books, and tomorrow we will get started practicing writing. Samuel is very excited. Rachel gave us a little chalkboard to go along with the writing workbook and Samuel immediately picked it up, drew an "L" and told me what it was, what sound it made, and a few words that started with "L" (including "Lisa", of course).
Mainly I just want to make sure he can write his name, since he will be asked to do that a lot in kindergarten, but he's so excited about it, I think we'll be running with it. Next up is checking out some "Bob" books, which are apparently books for the early reading set that are written using only words that are spelled phonetically. We already knew how non-sensical English spelling is, but now that we are sounding out words with Samuel left and right, it really hits home how difficult it is to teach someone how to spell properly in English. I remember when I was studying in Italy and I learned that the subject "spelling" simply doesn't exist in Italian schools. Since Italian letters always sound the same, you can just sound out any word to spell it correctly.
Shira is definitely listening to Samuel and his letter interests, it wouldn't surprise me if she started reading and writing very early just because of it. She has been singing the alphabet of late. But her most notorious new skill at the moment is her use of colloquial English. She can be heard saying "Oh man!" with just the right intonation repeatedly through the day. She said "Oh jeez!" yesterday, and I hopefully nipped that in the bud (though Samuel got confused and told her not to say that but "Damn it!" instead, which I then had to remind him I didn't want either of them to say either. Oy.)
She also enjoys the superlative "super" and uses it frequently to describe her emotions. As in, "Me super sad because ball undies (her fave underwear that has soccer balls, baseballs and basketballs on them) are in the laundry," and "Me super happy I see Bubbie next week and she sew buttons on my shirt." Also, yesterday she informed me, totally unprompted, "Me had super good time with Fabiola. We went to park and made popscicles."
Most days they are just so perfect it almost hurts. I almost never want to give them away to strangers anymore.
Immediately after Thanksgiving dinner at Grandpa Lou's house, we zipped the kids into their jammies, brushed teeth, said goodnight, and got in the car for the long drive to Bubbie's house. The next morning we left Steve behind to get a break (he had spent the last couple of weeks taking care of everybody as I got over the plague) and loaded ourselves into Bubbie's car to visit Great Grandma Sarah and Great Grandpa Sol. 
And after preschool for Shira, we head over to Samuel's preschool for storytime and the goodbye song.
