While the boys have been busy learning while having so much fun, Ruth has been busy with her movement. She has started crawling forward, and just today has started crawling up onto our Nugget cushions. She is progressing really quickly and is definitely our earliest mover (got to keep up with those big brothers!). She has also started making noises with her mouth and tongue and is really starting to enjoy food. She'll try anything and is getting batter at eating some of it, rather than only sucking and spitting it out like she was at first.
I also want to record a fun conversation I had with the boys about numbers. They both love to count and Micah especially loves to mentally manipulate numbers, often coming up to me to tell me that 5 and 5 make 10, but so do 9 and 1, etc. So I decided to start "Number Talks" with the boys, in which I present a problem and they tell me how to solve it in any way they can. I presented the problem in the picture below over breakfast and the following conversation occurred:
Ezra: Well there are 10 in this column, and 10 in this one, and 3 in this one (after counting each column individually).
Me: Can you figure out how many that is all together?
Ezra: No...
Micah: Yes! 10 and 10 is 20 and 3 more... 21, 22, 23. It's 23!
I noticed a strong stigma amongst my college peers and the parents of the students I taught that math wasn't fun and was hard, which definitely carried over into their teaching or kids. I'm hoping our kids will love math and see the fun in number manipulation, which starts with having confidence that numbers are not scary!