Reading a book to Ethan

Reading a book to Ethan means being peppered with three to four questions for each sentence read. For example, yesterday we were reading a book about a princess who was turned into a dragon by her evil stepmother. “Is it a girl dragon?” “Is that her father?” “Is that her mother?” “Is she bad?” “Who is that?”

I love all his questions. I also love trying to answer them – thinking of how frustrating it must be for him at school and other places where there are so many kids he can’t get all his questions answered. (At his after-K open house recently they had a video of the kids being visited by firemen – the teachers remarked, and I watched, as Ethan shouted happily to the firemen as many questions as there was time to inject – “Is that your hat?” “Is that the ladder?” “Why are you wearing that?” “What’s that?” until he had several of them laughing.)

Ethan has started the very beginning of being able to sound out words. It’s very cute. He’s also a persistent and happy guesser (something we’ve always seen in him), made apparent when he happily shouts out random answers for what the word might be (he guessed ‘piano’ for the word ‘storm’ (??), or ‘cat’ for the word ‘seven’ (??). This skill will serve him very well for school and standardized tests in a few years, I think, since he’s often right).

Last night we watched the movie Star Wars, since he’s been asking about it a lot. We saw “Dark Vader” battle with “Lute Skywaller” with their “Life Savors”. There were lots of questions about “Is that the good guy?” “Is that a bad guy?” “Are they good or bad”, and finally in the last dramatic scenes, “Is that Luke? Is that Luke? Is that Luke?” since Luke and all the other good guys were wearing helmets.

When he woke up this morning he told us he had a dream in which he was fighting with ‘Dark Vader’ using their “Life Savors”, and he won, gave 'Dark Vader' a band aide, and then they were friends.