Next year, the googolplex

Tonight we tried to explain really big numbers to Pete: millions, billions, trillions, . . . googol.

Carolyn: "And you know what's even bigger than googol?"

Pete: "Googol and one!"

Carolyn: "And googol and two, and googol and three . . ."

Pete: "All the way up to GOOGOL AND FORTY-NINE!"

What this one goes to

Pete and I went to the homecoming parade last night. Returning home, Pete decided to set up dozens of his toy cars in a parade. He said, "They'll all move along very slowly. Each by one, each by one! And one and one and one and one! That's a lot of elevens!"

Four items, no unifying clever title

1. He's utterly obsessed with books. I mean, one wants kids to like books, right, but he's relentless, especially now that he's discovered the wonder of getting a whole new batch of library books every week. I can step back and think objectively how cool this is. But I admit that there are also times when I want to give him a Clifford video or a donut so he'll give the reading a break already.

2. Lest #1 seem a bit of insufferable puffery of little Pete's intellectual ambition, consider this point as well. He was counting something a few days ago--coffee scoops, I think--and made it up to fifteen. I took the opportunity to talk him through the late teens, and then he remembered twenty, and I told him about the twenties. Then I explained thirty and, getting increasingly excited, told him that if he figures out how the twentys and thirtys work, he'll be able to do hundreds of numbers in no time at all! Pete mulled that over for a minute and responded, "I want to play basketball."

3. This is less a Pete story than a humanity story. Pete got a new race car from a box of Cheerios a couple of days ago. He played with it for a little bit, then went upstairs and came back down. He said, referring to his established race car collection, "I put it with the other ones, and now there are ten." There's nothing unusual about that sentence in the conversation of Pete and his peers, but it blew me away that the human mind goes from no language to that kind of complexity in such a short time. The sentence involves space, numbers, time, categorization, agency, two kinds of pronouns. I've probably said this before, but the most of the things that amaze me about early development are the ordinary ones.

4. Pete has developed a completely diabolical strategic sense. For example, if he gets a little scrape on his knee, he will want a Band-Aid on it. When he was younger, he would want the Band-Aid right away. Now he waits. The rest of the day passes, then bedtime books, then getting in bed, then saying good night. 15 minutes later, he demands the Band-Aid. Knowing we won't refuse him that (or a couple of other key things like trips to the potty), he has saved it all day so that he has the right ammo for disrupting the bedtime routine and avoiding sleep. We have begun to evolve countermeasures, but he's winning the battle in a rout.

Limits

Pete's favorite number has long been five. He insists that he has
five grandparents, for instance, and this evening he wanted to go to
five restaurants for dinner. He recently decided in the singing of
"Take Me Out to the Ballgame"--a frequent event here--that it
is, in fact, FIVE strikes you're out at the old ball game. I think we
have a healthy sense of the value of imagination over undue literalism,
but come on! Three strikes. Three. Carolyn is with me on this
one.

Pete becomes a toddler

I haven't written much about Pete lately, so as the Super Bowl winds down, I'll try to capture some of what it's been like to watch him pass his second birthday and careen into full-fledged toddlerhood.

We've been struck by how Pete develops in streaks and bursts. For example, he was a little slow to pick up his numbers; he had gotten pretty good at identifying two of something, and he had become fond of five ("Pie!") as a word for more than two. He had said three only sporadically and almost never four. Furthermore, he had never counted, even to two. Last Sunday, we all came downstairs in the morning, and Pete was standing in the kitchen as Carolyn prepared the coffee that would fuel the day. Pete looked around, then, as Carolyn put the scoops of coffee in the filter, said with complete authority, "One! Two! Three! Four! Five!" Or, phonetically, "One! Choo! Fwee! Fo-or! Pie!" And he squealed and clapped and laughed until he fell on his butt.

He's still shaky with three and four, and he still likes shooting balls at his hoop more than counting them--these developments have been complicated and cyclical, but the initial gains can be flashes of lighting. Just as he passed that tipping point from not counting to counting in a night, he later did a somersault out of the blue and began without warning to catch thrown balls; the kid who wouldn't leave our grasp in a swimming pool eight months ago wanted immediately to climb the ladder and jump in by himself this winter. In the last few weeks, Pete has gone from identifying no letters to naming about half the capitals most of the time.

I say these things not to brag about Pete but to wonder at toddlerhood: this is the stuff kids learn at Pete's age, but I find myself endlessly amazed by the way the process plays out, and my favorite part is how--as in the counting breakthrough--Pete takes such joy in the new things he can do.

Oh, a random bit of fun from the last week: Pete continues to love music--playing it as he can (mostly drums and kazoo), listening, watching videos, whatever. Becuase Carolyn's dad plays banjo, that is one of Pete's favorite instruments, so I found him this vidoe of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. As we watched it together after breakfast a few days ago, Pete started holding his nose and saying, "oooo." Over and over. After watching this for a minute I realized what was happening: Pete was playing harmonica! So we learned that word and looked for other harmonica videos. Excellent.

Tunney, tunney, tunney

From Carolyn

Pete turned two on Saturday. And he will answer you correctly if you ask him how old he is.

He's finally learning colors, or at least learning to tease us by insisting that everything green is blue. He can be quite crafty.

However, I think his repeated proud statements about his "big cup," in which he consistently replaced the final "p" with a "k" sound, were actually innocently spoken.

He traveled very well on our adventures out east, remembering how to sleep in the car and being game for new places to sleep many nights. The saddest moment, though, came the night after we drove through Pennsylvania. Pete loved driving through the tunnels along the Pennsylvania turnpike, and was very sad each time we headed out into the sunlight and left the tunnel behind. He woke up that night crying. Sometimes when he cries at night he's just fussing, but sometimes he's crying for some specific thing. If we can hear him say what he wants--water or his blanket, for instance--we'll go in and give it to him. That night, though, we heard him wimpering "Tunney, tunney, tunney." It took us a few seconds to figure out that he wanted tunnels, something we were unable to provide on the spot.