First, out came the Play-Doh. We rolled and squished, pressed out cookie-cutter shapes, and learned what happened when we mixed colors. She named the colors, the animal shapes, and made animal sounds. She likes to narrate what she's doing as she does it, so her conversation went like this:
"Squish, squish, squish. A giraffe! A brown giraffe. Squish the giraffe!"
Next came Dominoes. She wasn't much interested in matching the dots to one another, the way you do when you're playing the game. No, today was all about towers! She counted as she stacked dominoes as high as they would go and shrieked with glee when they fell over. Her tallest tower reached thirteen dominoes. We were using an upturned laundry basket as a table. When she tired of towers, she started lining up dominoes in the lip of the basket, counting as she went. Then she tipped the basket over to watch the dominoes spill all over the floor. Then we counted them again as we picked them up and put them away.
Then she pulled out the Button String bag. The first time she tried this activity, she got very frustrated and was unable to master the art of fitting a button through a button hole. This time around, she got the idea within seconds and quickly grew bored with the project by her third successfully buttoned square, but part of that may also have been that it was close to naptime by that point.
