Three letters

Delivering letters -- Isaac has been a long-time fan of the postal service, and in the past month his interest has expanded beyond admiring the trucks to actually delivering letters himself. We've been keeping our bedroom well-stocked with junk mail, as Isaac likes to hand out the mail as we leisurely drink our tea on weekend mornings -- it keeps him occupied for five or ten minutes, anyway. As I wrote in my last post, he has an alter ego as the mailman, and he thanks himself as such when he delivers the mail -- "Thank you, mailman," he'll say as he hands you a postcard promoting a Scientology workshop. Strangely, he also calls himself mailman when he's eating and he gets food on his hands -- he says, "Mailman hands sticky; napkin." I'm not sure where he got the idea that letter carriers are tidy eaters.

Recognizing letters -- About a month ago we discovered that Isaac recognized a few letters, namely O, I and L. It's hard to gauge how many more letters he knows now, since he's not very consistent in his answers, and we're trying not to quiz him too intently in order to keep it fun. He knows A, M, and W for sure, and probably three or four more. We did get a magnetic alphabet for the refrigerator, and recently Isaac told Craig he wanted to use it to "Spell dog," and proceeded to hand him the letter D, unprompted. But even better than knowing letters, he's interested in them -- he points them out when he notices them, like on T-shirts and signs, and lately he wants to hear us sing what he calls the ABB Hong [see below]. I also think it's adorable when he "reads" the letters on the back of his high chair -- it says "Eddie Bauer" in a stylized cursive script that Isaac can't read, but he turns around to point at it, letter by letter, as he says a random string of five or six letters. Then he says, "Eddie!"

Pronouncing letters -- A number of important sounds are still missing from Isaac's speech, including S, F, R, J, and W (or really ess and see, eff, arr, and so forth). Sometimes this gets a little confusing. Horse and foot both sound remarkably alike, and I keep thinking he's saying the similar-sounding hurt. He likes to play a driving game where he pretends to put on his seatbelt, but every time he says seatbelt I end up asking him, "What did you say?" As everything else he says grows more clear, these missing sounds really stand out. He can pronounce neighbor boy perfectly; he can say prune lilac, big clipper; he can tell you that there's a Buddha on our birdbath; he can even identify a coyote with great precision -- but when he wants to hear the ABC Song he has to ask for the ABB Hong.