My Little Scholars

I wish I could have had someone with me on my drive with Norah today.  Or at least a black box-type device to record what she was doing.  And believe me when I say not all drives are as pleasant as today's.
I was taking her out to do some errands, and I was listening quietly to the news on NPR.  I notice that she's saying letters.  Not in ABC order, but just letters.  I listen more closely.
"a...n....d...e.....r....s...o...n...."
"Norah! You're spelling the letters on that truck!"
"o...i...l....c...o."
While I was zoning out to the radio my daughter was displaying the ability to read the letters painted onto the oil truck in front of us.  She continued to read letters and numbers on other trucks when we got on the highway.  Although she said "truck!" whenever she finished saying a stream of letters and/or numbers, she was reading them with about 90% accuracy.  (Not that I was taking a running record or anything!)

And on that note, yesterday we went to our friends' house for dinner, after which Toby and their oldest (a first grader) disappeared upstairs.  BJ went to check on them and delivered this news: "They are... doing math.  We knew this day would come, but we didn't expect it so soon."


And lastly, a little thing that Norah does that has nothing to do with scholarly activities, but rather more to do with the season of shopping: she plans our errands around the color of the cart that she rides in or the color of the sign on the building.  Target is the "red cart" store, for example.  There's a blue store, a green store, and a grey store.  You can just see her little brain trying to work it out when we go into a store that has no carts. The buildings are sometimes named according to a characteristic toy: there's a train library and a giraffe library.  We ran into the librarian from the "train library" in line at the post office today.  She knew Norah's name (I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember hers) and said hello.  I told Norah to say hi to the librarian from the train library.  The librarian looked confused, but when I explained that we differentiated between locales by their toys she understood perfectly (and the other library has a 10-foot-tall giraffe in the children's section that's been there since I was a kid, so everyone calls it the giraffe library.).