High Five and Flash Cards

Story One...

People are always coming up to Parker going, "Gimme Five" and holding their hand up. He looks at them as if they are crazy and then looks at me slightly scared. I'm not sure why the High Five is so popular, but it is.

So last night, while reading books, we were reading Trashy Town, a new addition to the all time greatest hits, and he said, "Stop!, There are trash cans behind the pizza parlor." When he said Stop, he held up his hand to indicate stop. Then he thought about something for a moment, turned around, looked at me and said, "Gimme Five" and held up his hand for me to give him a high five.

So I did.

I went back to reading Trashy Town, "Dump it in, Smash it down, I love to clean up Trashy Town." Then Parker turned around again and while holding down his thumb, said, "Gimme Four."

So I did.


Story Two...

As you have read, we were having real problems with Parker not wanting to stay in his bed lately. We tried reasoning with him. He tried staying in bed with him. We tried letting him out of the bed. We tried ignoring him. He tried punishing him. Nothing worked. I was telling this to another mom and she said, have you tried a sticker board. You know, when the kid does something good, you give him a sticker and after a certain number of stickers, he gets a toy or prize or something. I thought that a 27 month old was wayyyy too young to comprehend all that, but at the same time, I was willing to try anything.

So I got some poster board and some stickers and some incredibly cheap toys like play dough, chalk, and crayons. I also got two sets of flash cards. One with letters and one with numbers. I didn't think he would get them, but I thought he would have fun playing with the cards. So the first time he got enough stickers to get anything (which was day one, since we were trying to explain the concept of the game to him), he got to select one prize. He picked the number flash cards. So we open them up. They have numbers on them and then pictures of random stuff. You know, like Two Fish. Three Buttons. One Flower. 10 Butterflies. There were about 30 cards in the box. Parker went through every one of them, one by one, telling me exactly what was on the card and how many there were. He got a couple wrong (said flower instead of hat and cake instead of ice cream), but he got every single number correct. And then he did it again in Spanish. The numbers, not the pictures.

As Michael said, Damn, that boy's got some game.