A Peanut sat on a Railroad Track...

Peanut has finally begun to sing. He cannot carry a tune yet, and he cannot remember more than a line or two of any song, but as he has never before displayed the slightest bit of interest in singing despite my doing it all the time since his birth, I am thrilled at this small development. Currently his favorite ditty is "Following the Leader" from Disney's Peter Pan, particularly the chorus, which goes, "Tee-dum. Tee-dee. A-teedeley-do-tee-day...etc"

So, many times a day, when he's feeling happy, he spontaneously breaks into this. Only he can't say it. It comes out: "Tee-dum. Tee-wee. A dee-dee-dee-dee-dum," but this is cuter than the original, and I laugh out loud every time I hear it, particularly the "tee-wee" part.

Occasionally while singing (or speaking) he comes upon a line whose difficulty daunts him, and after a couple of tries he shakes his head in annoyance and declares, "I can't say dat." Usually I can figure out what he's aiming for and walk him through it a word at a time, but not always.

He is very into trains, and particularly Thomas the Tank Engine, to my slowly dying dismay. (I don't mind trains, but Thomas annoyed me and I had not planned ever to expose him. A well-meaning grandparent let him watch an episode, however, and he was hooked. I have grown less irritated by it since then, having found the original books rather charming, and we watch the program rarely enough to keep it in my good graces.) So for his birthday we found a gently used Brio train table on craigslist, which Mr. Right Brain went to pick up, failed to follow the driving directions, and wound up driving about three hours longer than he should have. Then last weekend we learned a friend at church just sold an entire Thomas table and set that had they known we were looking, would have given it to us. FAIL.

However, the Brio set gets brownie points, in my book, for NOT having trains with goofy faces on their engines.

He is learning his alphabet, slowly, but baffles me with his continued ignorance of color. In an artsy household, you can bet we talk about colors all the time, yet at near three he still cannot identify them correctly or even consistently pick them out in a multiple-choice-type situation. He resists sorting items by color and still has no interest in coloring with crayons, markers, etc, all of which has begun to make me wonder if he is completely colorblind. I know how rare that is, but parental paranoia is a mighty persistent bug once it bites. I wonder how they test for such a condition.

I've been told it's too early to expect such things of him, but on the other hand I'm always hearing about how they have photographic memories at this age and soak up learning like a sponge as long as you keep it fun. Which I do. So which is it? Sigh.