Rachel, Owen and Kathryn

Reading books is something that Katy has always enjoyed, and now she will happily sit through much longer stories - often joining in when encouraged. She has the entire set of the Thomas the Tank Engine train books, of which we've only tackled a small subset. This evening at bedtime she suddenly announced she wanted to read the story of Duck. In case you don't know, Duck is a strange-shaped Great Western Railway engine, who takes no nonsense from anyone. Katy knows the character, but we've never read the story properly. I was struggling to find the required volume so I asked her "Katy, can you remember what colour the book is?" and she said "Mmm, mmm, orange". So I looked for an orange spine, and sure enough, the Duck book has an orange cover. As you might expect from books written by a Revd., these little stories are very heducational in promoting the values of hard work, honesty, forgiveness, friendship etc., but what I didn't remember from my chil

A doubling of output in the 6 weeks since my last post on this topic . Katy has reportedly just stuck her arms in the air and announced The moon lives up in the night sky! More chuckle-worthy utterences currently: an ambulance is an am-be-be, and when she comes out of the bath she is a vagrant (she means fragrant ).

This is just for "ahh" value really. Katy's last 4 molars are coming through, and though she's never been one to whinge she actually asked for some medicine last night, saying "Hurt in the mouth".

If you recognise the Joan Armatrading quote you must be at least as old as me. Or should that be I? Pronouns are another thing that cause difficulty in language acquisition. I was recently asked why children tend to refer to themselves in the third person. It might not be obvious unless you stop to think about it, but lots of different people can confusingly say "I", but only Katy can say "Katy" and mean herself; whereas lots of people say "you" to her and it always means Katy. Thus when I ask "Do you want to walk up the stairs or shall I carry you?" she will often reply "Carry you" - meaning "Carry me", of course. Comprehension is gradually dawning, however, as yesterday when I asked her who would do something she said "I do it", clearly meaning herself. We've just had a fairly adventurous weekend. Owen was up in the Lakes playing at the Ulverston Festival for 2 nights running, and staying with friends in Silver