Reading, writing and arithmetic

I know I should be doing more to encourage Hazel's education, but I have yet to regularly or systematically try to teach her to read or write. I think I was just hoping she'd magically pick it up on her own, with an assist here and there from me. She knows a couple words like Mommy, Daddy, moon and zoo, and other random words in her books. When I pulled up to the dry cleaner last week, she looked at the neon sign and said "open." Uh... yes, that says open. I don't remember teaching her that one...

Then a couple days ago I was trying to get her to try to write an A while signing Uncle Milton's birthday card (Happy Birthday to you today!). She's been writing H, E and L for quite awhile. She can draw mountains, so I kept telling her to draw one mountain and draw a line across it like for an H. That didn't help, so I drew some dots and tried to have her connect them, as we've been doing dot-to-dots for a few months. That didn't go well, and she ended up frustrated with herself and crying. (Sorry, Uncle Milton, that you got the frustrated version, but now you understand the dots on her card for you. And no, I have no idea why she wrapped up and sent you a block.) I placated her with her sticker collection and colored paper to make a collage, and half an hour later, she wanted me to come see that she wrote her name. Needless to say, I was quite impressed. She wrote her name again on my mother's day card, and the Z was backwards but at least had only three lines. I'm not sure why her E's continue to have so many horizontal lines - that's kind of funny.

Since her favorite tv shows are Diego and Dora (mostly Diego), she's picked up a bit of Spanish. I refreshed my own knowledge of Spanish numbers, and now Hazel can count fairly quickly to 20. When not repeating the words she learns on tv, she's asking me how to say things in Spanish or she's making up her own words. Those are mostly gibberish and pretty funny. I've taught her most of what I can remember (not much), and now she likes to say, "Te amo, Mama."

If she's concentrating, she can count to 1oo (in English of course). She can count to 100 by tens, because of a song on a CD, and I've been trying to teach her that if you add one to a number, you get the next number. Just making idle conversation... she's the one successfully applying it.