Pancakes!

Calli wanted to make pancakes this morning. She can do everything except measure the ingredients out correctly so she asked me to do that part. I pointed out on the bag that we would need 2 cups of mix and 1.5 cups of water. She went to get my 2-cup glass measuring cup that we had used to make pancakes the day before, but it hadn't been washed yet. So instead, I grabbed the first measuring cup I found in the drawer which happened to be a 1/2 cup. More or less talking out loud, I said, "So a half cup plus a half cup would be how much?" She thought a minute then said, "A whole cup!" So then I said, "Right. And we need TWO whole cups, so I'd have to do how many scoops with the half cup?" Without missing a beat, she announced, "4!" I was a little taken aback at that because I didn't expect that she'd make the mental leap so easily. I was even more surprised when she told me (WITHOUT prompting!) that because we needed 1.5 cups of water, we would need to do three scoops with the 1/2 cup. Wow!

This evening the three of us were playing with some colorful foam shapes. In trying to make a butterfly, I mentioned that I needed a yellow triangle while scanning the table for one. Rickson reached out, grabbed a yellow triangle and handed it to me. Again, I was a little surprised. That I'm aware of, he doesn't reliably know colors or shapes other than a circle. I also discovered the other day that he can count to 12 and quantify up to around 5 or 6. Pretty neat!

Just a few minutes ago, Calli "read" me the story "One Frog Too Many" by Mercer Meyer. (It has no words, just some cute illustrations.) She named the main character Jake and told a pretty entertaining story, but she actually got the gist of it in there - that the big frog was jealous of the new small frog, but when he pushed the little frog off the raft and they thought he was lost, the large frog was repentant and guilty. Then the little one came back, and the large frog accepted that he was around to stay. Very cute!