Jacob Is Three
September 27th, 2009
Jacob’s third birthday was Saturday, and I thought I ought to give a bit of an update on him.
I’ll start with his exactness. Jacob has become very particular about certain things. This morning, I was getting him dressed for church. We had this conversation:
Me: OK Jacob, it’s time to get your pull-ups on.
Jacob: No, Dad! Not pull-UPS. I don’t have free (3) of them! I have one. It a pull-UP.
Me: OK. Let’s put it on… Now, let’s put on your pants.
Jacob: Daaaad! Not pants! They SHORTS!
So yes, Jacob is trying to correct me about plurals. Also, when I sing Home On The Range to him at bedtime, and get to the line that says, “and the skies are not cloudy all day,” Jacob will look outside, and point out, “the skies ARE cloudy today!” (Even if they’re not.)
But the big thing is guitars. Terah wrote about how this happened. But suffice it to say that he’s been almost all-guitar, all the time.
At dinner time, he’ll hold a spoon across his chest and strum the “lots of pretend strings” over the big end. Outside, he’ll find leaves from irisis, and excitedly yell, “I have LOTS of guitars!”
Pretty soon it wasn’t just him that needed to play guitars. He’d hand an iris leaf or a spoon to me and say, “shall you play it too?” So I’d start strumming my leaf, and he’d smile happily for a second. Then, “No, not like that! This way!” He meant I was supposed to hold it in a certain position, but it was not always clear exactly what he wanted.
Then at supper Friday night, we had some family here, and Jacob said, “Shall we ALL play guitars?” And he’d keep repeating it until we all did it. And he spent about 5 solid minutes getting us each to hold our spoons in the proper musical position. Then he was happy.
So you can imagine the excitement when he got a guitar from his grandparents on Saturday. It’s a child-sized one, but a real one, with metal strings. He proudly went around sitting on many different chairs to try out his guitar on each one. He played it in the car on the way home. He strummed it at home. He skipped dessert so he could play. And he cried every time he had to put it down: at dinner time, at bedtime last night, when it was time to go to church today.
The next thing he wanted was for everyone to sing while he played the guitar. That was a bit difficult, since, after all, it is a 3-year-old playing a guitar he doesn’t know how to play. He seemed to really enjoy it though.
I have some great photos of him playing his guitars I’ll be uploading hopefully this week.
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That phase of grammar learning is called “over-regularization”, a very interesting and oft studied phenomenon, as it seems so counter intuitive.
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