At 18 months old Athena had a fascination with the moon. She'd point it out anytime she could and ask to go out at night to see it. I'd make up songs about the moon and sing them to her. I came up with a little tune I could play on the guitar and played the song while she danced around.
Around that same time she was also learning sign language and loving that! We'd watch Signing Time videos together and practice every day. I recorded in her journal all the sign language words she knew and it was over 50 signs. We couldn't always understand what she was saying so her knowing so many signs really enhanced our ability to communicate.
Dimitri has had different fascinations than Athena. At 1 1/2 he loved to write. He took chalk and just drew all over everything with it. At first I thought it was drawing he loved but as time went on I could see that it was a fascination with letters, not drawing, that inspired him. He began asking me to write different letters and he'd watch as I did. Every day, all day, he'd make his requests, "Write an A!" "Write a B!" "Write a T!" "Write an O!" I did my best to encourage this by happily pulling out a paper and pen and writing the letters he asked for but I had other things to do as well! Once while making dinner the requests started again "Write an H! Write an R!" I explained that I'd love to but I'm making dinner right now. He kept asking so I got a paper and pencil out and handed it to Athena (who was about 3 at the time). "Here, honey, write letters for Dimitri." I didn't think she could actually do it, I just thought she would pretend and it'd be enough to distract Dimitri while I made dinner. Suddenly Dimitri started yelling "i! i! i! i!" Sure enough, she had written an I. She wrote a few other letters that day as well- i, H, T, and O. Not too long afterwards Dimitri was writing letters himself. His favorite thing was to write his name. Everywhere. On paper, cement, doors, in legos, with play dough. Oh, he loved it.
About a year later Dimitri was fascinated by something else: US Geography. We bought a puzzle of the United States and he was so fascinated by it that I drew up a US map on some butcher paper and we all colored it together. Dimitri is so fun to watch when he gets excited. He jumps up and down, claps, and exclaims "Yes! That's it!" He would see states in his food. He would see states in cracks in the cement, he saw them everywhere.
We had so much fun with it. We learned a states song, colored pictures, talked about which states extended family members lived in, imagined visiting new states, discussed animals and plants that lived in different parts of the country, and put that puzzle together hundreds of times (always singing the song and pointing to the states once we got it together). We found a map painted on the ground at a park and oh he went crazy for that! He loved it so much that I formed a whole preschool curriculum around world geography. But that's another story.
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