In's and out's of HE

For ages now I've been reading that Iona should be taking things out of containers and putting them back in - well the taking things out has been going brilliantly, but unfortunately not so the putting them in! Well, today we went to the Stay and Play session at the local children's centre and Iona decided to spend most of the time in the outside play area. They'd set up a sink full of water, with squashy fish and boats floating in it, and Iona was one of the children fascinated by this. Unsurprisingly, she started by taking the fish and boats out, and splashing in the water so much that she might as well have jumped in, her clothes were so wet! Then I watched, open-mouthed, as she put some of them back in the water - I was ecstatic! So much so, that I didn't have the heart to stop her splashing. She repeated it several times, so I began to believe that it might not be a fluke. However, I was a bit cynical about her repeating this behaviour at home.

Later, at home, the living room was a total tip where she'd been practising the "taking out" behaviour, so I started putting her building bricks away in their bag and asked her to help me. Incredibly, she put several bricks into the bag, before she got bored and started throwing them around the room. I even managed to persuade her back onto task again several times, before she started trying to empty the bag again. Okay, it wasn't just the bricks she was trying to put in the bag, but other toys too, but it's definitely a major advance in Iona's ability.

It seems to have been a day of advances, as she was asking during the evening about the ITV4 logo on the TV, and she was so taken with it that she spent the rest of the programme asking about it, then repeating "IT, IT, IT". She also got the idea that mice say "eek", which she also repeated copiously, and was very amused by the piano playing on "Show Me, Show Me".