"Now I Know My ABCs..."

It's no secret that Kaiser is a big fan of the ABCs. He loves the song. He loves watching Meet the Letters. He loves playing with his Leap Frog ABC magnet set on our refrigerator. He loves splashing around with his foam letters at bathtime.

But you can imagine our surprise when, nearly a month ago, Kaiser (from what seemed like out of nowhere) started identifying letters. Not only could he pick out the letter "B", but when he saw the letter "B", he would point to it and say "B"! At first we thought it was just kind of a fluke. You know, maybe he just knew one or two of the letters that he was seeing and hearing most often. Within a few days, though, we learned that we were wrong. The kid actually legitimately knows most of his letters!

I've been meaning to get footage of this to share for a while, but I always forget to grab the camera until Kaiser has been "practicing" for a while and then decides he's "done" performing. Here are a couple of clips of him picking out his magnet letters for me in the kitchen the other day. He has some trouble manipulating the magnets (probably because he's definitely a lefty who is attempting to use his right hand) and struggles to find the "W", but other than that I think he does a pretty darn good job. :)

And here is a video from two nights ago of Daddy "drilling" him with his foam letters in the bathtub. The kidlet just happened to get the hiccups right before I popped in on them, which kind of makes him hard to understand. (In addition to the fact that he's only an almost 16-month-old and is just sometimes hard to understand in general!) I'd say that most of his letters are distinguishable (at least to his mommy and daddy, who hear him talk all the time--I guess you can be the judge!?), but he still has some trouble saying H, J, K, L, Q, R, and W.

You'll also notice that Brett throws in a couple of numbers. Kaiser has really loved practicing counting lately, as well. At this point, he can fairly consistently say 2, 4, and 6 clearly. 1 sounds like "un", 3 sounds like "fee" or "vee", 5 sounds like "fuf" or "fuv", and 8 sounds like "et"; 7 and 9 are kind of hit-or-miss.

As always, we are thrilled to watch Kaiser's progress and so proud of our growing, learning boy!