Learning Curve

Benjamin's learning style is very interesting...I've been observing it for awhile now. Like 5 years or so. He has always been the type to not get it, not get it, not get it...BOOM. He can do it. None of this wasting time with progressive steps or practice. When he was a baby, I wondered if he was ever going to be mobile. Then he decided to army crawl for all of an afternoon before moving on to the real deal.

And now it's puzzles. He just did not get how to put puzzles together. His idea of putting puzzles together was watching me do it. I would give him a piece and ask him where he thought it should go. He would kind of fiddle around, twisting it this way and that, then give it back to me and say, "I don't know." Even if it was the last piece of the darn picture!

Then this morning, he's putting puzzles together--doing the whole thing by himself. There was no easing into it, no learning to put the edge together first...he's just doing it.

I have a feeling his learning style is a somewhat frustrating mixture of mom's perfectionism and dad's quick wit (and hatred of busywork). It's like he doesn't want to attempt anything until he's sure he can do it just right. And then he catches on to the "just right" pretty quickly and is ready to move on to bigger and better things.

He's also recently learned to write letters. One day he couldn't do it, the next day he could write every letter of the alphabet. He'll ask me how to spell something and he'll just sit and write every letter as I say it. And it used to be that he would write them kind of wherever he felt a letter should go on the page. So thank you could end up YUTKNAHO.

Hey...I bet he'll be good at anagrams.

But yesterday I was making dinner (macaroni and cheese counts, right??) while the kids were minding their own business with some paper and colored pencils. Suddenly he said, "Look, Mom" and held this up:

I said, "How did you learn how to spell Ainsley?" to which he replied, "I just remembered it. A-I-N-S-L-E-Y."

I thought this was a pretty cute picture, worthy of publication. I asked him why Ainsley had so many eyes and he said that two of those are nostrils. And she's standing on a hill, in case you were wondering. But up until just a few months ago, he had never even attempted to draw a tangible object. It was all just scribbling for the first four and a half years of life.

It makes it so it's rather difficult to teach things. I'll fret and worry for months, thinking he's going to go through life not knowing how a puzzle goes together, and figuring that all my attempts at teaching him edge pieces vs. inside pieces is a complete failure. Then one morning I wake up and he's got a completed puzzle laying out on the coffee table.

Go figure.

And just because I'm in charge of this blog and I revel in the power that yields, I'll add a cute picture that I took of my girls today (even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with puzzles, letters, or Benjamin):