Our daughter Eloïse, who turned two last Thursday, is starting to write letters, or at least she pretends she does. She can accurately recognize and name almost the whole alphabet, on the keyboard or on book covers. Naming letters and colors is one of her favorite pastimes these days. Answering her "yes this is blue" for the umpteenth time is an exercise in patience, so we're introducing variations ("this is light blue, look how your pants are darker than your sweater.")

Today she started scribbling little symbols on a piece of paper. She points to one and proudly tells me "N." I look at it a bit dumbfounded, and, believe it or not, it more or less looks like an N. I ask for an O, and her second attempt is actually not bad (looked more like a Q, but at least there's a closed oval part in it.)

She was beaming, and hey, can I be a proud daddy or what? It's funny because she still barely talks (though it's obvious she understands a lot more vocabulary than she's able to use), but she's groking symbols. She tells apart squares from circles too. Last week I started drawing non-square rectangles, lozenges and trapezoids, but I quicky realized I was losing her attention and I needed to explain a lot of concepts before I could get there! I guess I'll have to start with parallels, right angles, and the concept of equal sizes. Should help the handwriting too. Not that I believe handwriting is a vital skill by itself (I almost never use a pen anymore, I mean, you can't even frigging cut-and-paste), but it's going to support her mental and motory growth.