Aiden is making a lot of progress when he’s singing. He’s most likely to sing when not in the spotlight. His most common stage is his crib – he often sings before bedtime or in the morning.
Aiden doesn’t sing many songs from start to finish unassisted, but will sing bits on his own. The first two lines are most common before he gets distracted.
Aiden enjoys singing Twinkle Twinkle, Hurry Hurry Drive the Firetruck, Hello Everybody, Zoom Zoom and the Bananas Song. Sometimes a song he’s been thinking about will crop up, like the ABCs or Wheels on The Bus.
Just today, Aiden was in his crib when I hear: “Aiden want to sing The Wheels on the Bus. The wheels on the bus goes round and round. The wheels on the bus go round and round. Awwwww wheels not working. Not working anymore. Probably not working.”
As you can see, easily distracted. He always ends up on a tangent in his pretend world making up stories.
Aiden will also make up songs. “Aiden shoes on. Aiden shoes off. Aiden shoes on. Aiden shoes off.” When he then said: “Mommy, sing Aiden’s shoe song!”, I clued in that he was doing more than just babbling. Super cute.
It’s clear Aiden wants to sing more. He will often move his lips when someone sings, trying to learn the words perhaps. Or lip sync? Cute though. He’s also participating more now that he’s started preschool once a week (my guess).
It’s been a big month for Aiden. After all the joys of Christmas, we settled back into our routine. Aiden is definitely a boy for routine: he was excited to return to playgroups and all his friends. Two weeks ago, he began attending his first pre-pre-school program, a 2-hour drop-off program at Karen Magnussen; quite to my surprise, he took to it instantly. The first class, I had to return for the circle time, but he successfully transitioned into this last week on his own. I’m very proud of him and we’ve been re-enforcing his enjoyment of the class at every opportunity.
In other milestones, we learned that Aiden is to have a little brother and he had his first successful sit on the potty just tonight! He still has no idea when he’s going pee, but we’ll try to re-enforce his success today and see where it leads.
Enjoys snow. We finally had a snowfall and spent a lovely morning building snowmen, making snow angels, throwing or shovelling snow or just making footprints. Great fun. Cold hands.
Loves to count anything. If he drops a number, it’s often the 5. Not as consistent between 10 and 20.
Can recognize most of the alphabet, though gets easily confused. Better at recognizing a given letter in a small set than being prompted for what a letter is.
Aiden loves to describe the world around him – everything he sees, hears or tastes. His variety of expressions is expanding to include such descriptions as weird, crazy, silly, and funny
Aiden loves to pretent to hide something like magic… “Where’s the X? I no know, where is it? Here it is!”
Has an amazing sense of humour. He will see things and label them as funny (like a car stuck in the snow), emphasizing his point with a fake laugh. Yes, a fake laugh. It’s a big like a hiccup with a forced smile.
Likes to describe something as “not” something else: “This is Aiden’s milk. Not Mommy’s milk.” or “Not going to Moja. Going to JJ Bean!”
Wants details on everything. Wants to know the name of every flower, every kind of truck, every piece on any kind of train, and details of the route we’re driving to get somewhere.
Tries to dictate driving: “Go left!” Thankfully he’s mostly ok with just narrating what I’m doing. I spend a lot of time talking about driver safety and routes. He’s learning quite a lot.
Is trying to sing songs, though mostly at home when he feels most comfortable or in the car. Current favourites include The Banana Song, Twinke Twinkle, Hurry Hurry Drive the Firetruck, Zoom Zoom, a Hello Everyone song from Gymboree and tidbits of many others.
Aiden loves to say: There it is, Find it, Want it, Get it, There it goes, There you go, Want somefing to eat, Mommy drive, No go home, Oh Mommy, look!, That’s better Mommy, I see it, Where are we going?, Oh no! What happened?, That’s fun, Nope,
Phrases of Aiden’s I love: heckacarpet, walkaroni, Aiden yikes it, I no know [I don't know], mananas (bananas), want Mommy cuddles, Thank you Mommy, Daddy works in the Mancouver, i-see-um [museum]
I’m trying to cherish the very last of the baby words that Aiden has left. Some of them are just too adorable not to enjoy. My favourite baby word is “heckacarpet” for “helicopter”, close behind “walkaroni” for “macaroni”, so I captured it on video before it disappeared completely:
I haven’t made any effort to correct how Aiden says helicopter. For the most part, he self-corrects on his pronunciation. In some cases, he chooses to stick to his baby words for unknown reasons: “baa baa” for sheep or “manana” for banana. I know for sure he can say both words correctly, and yet they remain baby words.
Aiden has developed a comedic personality. Sometimes he’ll fib on something, of example, saying a cow says “meow” just to get a laugh. He even has a fake laugh when he wants to show that something is funny. One thing I find truly funny is his new desire to have us repeat words or phrases…
“Mommy say that: spout!” or “Mommy say that: woman on a red motorcycle.”
I’m not sure where this comes from. Perhaps it comes from us trying to teach Aiden new and complex words (“Can you say that?”) or perhaps it comes from Dora the Explorer when Dora or Boots yell “Say map! Say map!”.
Whatever it is, it’s quite funny. Weird. But funny.
For Christmas, Santa gave Aiden his very first board game: the I Can Do That Games Curious George – Discovery Beach. The premise of the game is to find hidden treasures. You select cards, look under the panels, and find the matching objects. You shake up the box so that the items always move about to different places on the board or become buried / unburied in the sand.
We don’t follow the rules of the game yet: we let Aiden look under all the panels, not using the spinning wheel, and we don’t collect cards we’ve ‘won’. So far, we lay out several cards for Aiden and he chooses one to look for – he will pull up panels until he finds what’s on his card, though sometimes we have to shake up the box again.
Aiden has a lot of fun playing this game. He loves looking for the cards that are more open ended, “any brown” or “any shell”, and cheers whenever he finds a matching item. He’ll happily sit and play this game with us for a solid half hour.
