After a few weeks of ignoring these opposite cards, DJ selected them out of the blue one evening. We laid out half the cards (30 sets total) and I pulled one card at a time from the other stack. Then DJ found the matching (opposite) card. In this photo, I have a long rope and he’s looking for a short rope. He actually did about half of the matches before losing interest. How did I know he had lost interest? He started sitting on the displayed cards, tossing them in the air, shaking his head and making silly noises. You know, basic toddler speak for “Mommy, I’d like to not do this anymore.”

Then he selected the red knobless cylinders and began stacking them. This is a very hard set to stack because they get very tall and thin as you go up. He made it to the second to the last before the tower lost balance. To his credit, he did have each cylinder in proper order which I was impressed with.

Then he tried to stack the yellow knobless cylinders which should have been easier because they get shorter the thinner they are. But he was a little cocky and didn’t take his time, so you can see in the picture they are out of order and not centered properly. Not long after the picture, they toppled over and he lost interest in trying again. In the spirit of “keeping it real” you’ll notice his toys behind him are in disarray.

The smelling bottles are still very popular. As is typical of him, he won’t try to match the pairs but instead tries to identify the name of the scent. He recognizes orange pretty well and often gets peppermint correct, but tea tree and rosemary are almost always wrong. I wonder if that is because he has real world examples of orange and peppermint but the other two are foreign except for this activity. He is fascinated by smells right now though and loves to go through the spice rack and sample all the various scents. Don’t you just love that sniffing face?

This is our newest toy that I bought used today for $12 from another mom in our toddler play group. It’s Lakeshore Learning See & Solve Manipulative Kit which retails for $50. The colored disks can be used for patterns and counting and it came with a bunch of number tiles and plus, minus & equal tiles. The intended math activities are not in line with Montessori so we won’t be using it that way but we can use it in a variety of Montessori ways for years to come. Today though DJ just had a great time exploring the contents and stacking the disks as high as he could.

We went to the Children’s Museum again and DJ played with this exhibit for the first time. Ping pong balls go in the tube to the right, then DJ turns the wheel which turns the chain and carries the ball up to the top where it is dropped into the plastic pipes on the left. DJ turned the wheel for a LONG time while other children fed the ping pong balls and two older boys rearranged the plastic pipes. It was really neat to see the cooperative activity.

DJ had a new practical life experience this week putting this walking cast boot on and off. This is a picture of my foot in the boot but it was his daddy who broke his toe. Ouch! Montessori has Dressing Frames, one of which is Velcro, that I’ve chosen not to buy in lieu of using clothing around the house. This boot really met his need to study Velcro as he worked with it for a long time, undoing and redoing the Velcro straps.

This is how DJ fell asleep tonight. He has entered the age of Imagination and has declared that shadows are “weird,” which is not okay from his perspective. After some consoling, daddy convinced him to sit in his rocking chair with his stuffed cat to avoid the shadows. Sometime after daddy left, DJ must have gotten up to get his favorite book, Winnie the Pooh, because this is how we found him, sound asleep, when we next checked on him. So sweet.