My two year old can "read"!

For a little while now Cameron has been able to finish the last word or two of each line of his favorite books. And today I was singing "It's Raining It's Pouring" and he was saying the words along with me (more in a speaking voice than a singing one). And tonight while changing his diaper I handed him a board book of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?" by Eric Carle and he started reading the book. And he would turn the pages to the next page for each new animal mentioned in the story.

I realize that this is just because he's memorized it, but it's the action of pretend play, the memorization, the pronunciation of the words, and the focus that blow my mind. And this is not the only book he can do this to, so it's not a one trick pony. He can "read" the books "Wow, Said the Owl" and "Go Dogs Go". He's also saying three and four word sentences and is a little parrot with words, so we have to watch what we say now.

Even Evan is doing some of the "reading" now too and will say the last word in each line of some stories, though we do have to give him an extra long pause and ignore Cameron's shouting of the correct word so that Evan knows he needs to speak. But he totally gets the concept and is really starting to open up.

Evan seems to be struggling with two major things: teething molars keeping him up all night every night, and sleep un-training. For the last three or four nights Evan has been waking up screaming every 5 to 40min and nothing seems to curb the discomfort. But his behavior is so unlike him that we almost don't know for sure if this is what it is. It seems that during the day he's fine and despite the lack of sleep he is getting (and us grownups too) he's performing perfectly at feeding clinic. The other issue is that because sometimes Evan has time settling down at nap time in feeding clinic, the girls managing the naps in the playroom have had to resort to rocking him to sleep. This is a big No No in our house, mostly because we can't rock both boys and whomever is not getting rocked gets upset and they generally don't sleep well through the night because they wake up looking for me. But since the girls in the playroom have 10 kids to settle down for naps or quiet time, four of them on feeding tubes, I told them to continue doing what works for them even if it's making our lives MISERABLE. I completely understand what it's like when you are outnumbered and don't have enough hands to go around and try to convince toddlers tied to tubes to go to sleep in a playroom. My misery will be short lived because I can re-sleep train the boys once the program is over, the girls in the feeding clinic get a whole new batch of kids to deal with every six weeks and have to start from scratch each time.

Tomorrow I will be working on a post to cover the last few days and the new protocol changes to the boys feeding therapies. Over the weekend they both consistently ate 2 ounces of either pureed stage 1, 2, and some stage 3 foods at every meal. Their liquid intake is back up again and the nurse hinted today that their weight is way up again and she'll be asking the GI director of the program if we can start cutting back on the boys formula volume in the tubes.