The Brain.

This picture is from about a month ago, but the story that I'm about to tell takes place in this very spot.

It's no secret that Remi loves the alphabet -- he's known all of the letters by sight for about 4 months now.

In the past few months, he's taken on colors and can now tell you all of the colors of his crayons as he is coloring with them... that list includes not only the usual Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange -- but also suprisingly -- Brown, White, Pink, Purple and Black. Last month the colors were somewhat scrambled, but now I'd say he's pretty much solid on all of them. You can even ask him to go into the box and grab you a pink crayon - and viola, you have a pink crayon.

He's got his body parts down pat, although for a bit he was confusing his elbow with that spot between your thumb and index finger. When I say body parts - again... he's got the usual Eyes, Nose, Month, Hands, Feet, Belly, Arms, Legs, Hands, Feet, Cheeks, but also knows some weird ones like Neck, Thumb, Pinky, Wrist, Ankle and Shin. And when I say that he "knows" them, I mean - if you ask him where they are, he can point to them -- but if you point to them, he can also tell us what they are in his own words.

I've already posted about his "shape cube" -- so I'm not going to repeat myself- but we've added his knowledge and love of shapes to the list.

Even though he learned the entire alphabet with basically no effort on our part - we were hesitant to introduce numbers because we didn't want to overwhelm him and confuse him.
Finally, about a month ago we decided to take on numbers (since we were running out of other things for him to accidentally learn) He has a number puzzle that he used to learn the shapes of the numbers and Miffy's counting book that he likes to read at night. Lately when we're out for walks or in the car he's been counting with us for fun. We say 1, he says 2, we say 3 -- etc... but this morning he COMPLETELY blew my mind.

We were coloring together at his desk... and he looks down at a row of four crayons and without counting them (outloud at least) he instantly looks up at me and says "Four!" Luckily Daddy was still home to hear this because no one would have believed me. Then he looks at (a very silly-looking) apple tree that I drew for him and I said, "How many apples do you see?" And I pointed at one and said "One" and then he pointed at them one at a time..."Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven."

Remi turned 18 months old yesterday. He now knows the alphabet, body parts, shapes, colors and is officially counting. This is going to be an adventure indeed!!