Allow me to set the table.
The kid is just nuts about letters. He loves numbers too, but he is absolutely nuts about his letters. He's got the magnetic ones that he plays with on the refrigerator, or on various sheet pans around the house (below is a picture of him doing that with his Pap-Pap and his Uncle Mason at their house in January). He's got a couple sets of foam letters too, some big, uppercase ones that pop out of foam squares that you can link together to form a mat. He also
has some smaller ones that are really for the bathtub, as they can stick to the tile walls, but he insists on carting them all over the house and playing with them.A couple of months ago Kiernan got interested in spelling out every word he saw. In fact, one day in particular, on our way to the airport, he got upset with me because I wouldn't keep the car still enough for him to spell out the signs we were passing. A little while after that Wendy started teaching him how to sound out the letters, and shortly after that he started to sound them out for himself, trying to put together words. He would put a line of letters up on the fridge, sound out the letters one by one--correctly--then make up a totally unrelated word like "blibberflimp" or something.
This seemed totally natural to me until we were at school one day and one of the teachers was playing with him, with some foam letters there. I was hanging back, letting him have some space. She turned to me, sitting a bit away from them, her eyes wide, and said, "He's sounding out the letters." I just shrugged. I mean, I've been able to sound out letters for years. Nobody ever makes a fuss.
At dinner a short while later he tried sounding out some of the words on one of the cool placemats his Aunt Amy made for him. She makes these collage placemats for him sometimes for birthday gifts and he just loves them. One of them has the word "Ginsburg" on it, written vertically. For some reason Wendy's family says the word "Ginsburg" at the start of every meal. Apparently it's German for "We don't believe in saying the blessing"...or something like that. They've explained what it actually means about fifty-three times to me, but I think I was concentrating on saying something pithy about the wine all those times.
So anyway, Kiernan spelled out the word "Ginsburg" on his placemat. He did this very quickly, and Wendy and I looked at each other, holding our breath. Was he going to read this word? Was this the moment?
He then said, "Dog!" and started laughing maniacally.
So...no.
But then on this last Saturday, Kiernan's Née-Née was over at the house to see him. Wendy broke out the finger paints and she, Renée, and Kiernan sat around making hand prints on butcher paper. I sat at the dining room table, writing in my journal. On a whim Wendy painted the following letters on the paper: C-A-T.
Kiernan moved around to her side of the paper, pointed at the letters, sounded them out without prompting, and said, "Cat."
Our three mouths simultaneously fell open. He read a word! Woo-Hoo! Wendy spelled out a few more three-letter words, and he carefully sounded out and read them all. It was a watershed moment, and I'm so pleased we were all there to see it.
I'm glad he picked the word "cat" as the first thing he's really read. It's a good word, and we have a cat. Plus, I think he was genuinely surprised with how the word ended.
Of course, by the time I got the video camera out to record the moment for posterity Kiernan had decided that every word we spelled out was "Guinea pig", so I don't think we have to worry about him getting ahead of himself.
