Lately, Matthew has been almost obsessed with numbers.  It started soon after Christmas when he kept asking addition problems, like, “Daddy, what is 1 + 5?”  Of course, however, it was Matthews and so it was more like, “Uhm, Daddddy, what is one-uh plus five-uh?”  (We aren’t sure why, for a while, he was adding “-uh” after a number in an almost sing song way to extend the word.)

This soon escalated to him just simply counting, starting with one and going as high as he could.  Often times, early on, about every nine numbers he would stop and say, “Daddy, what comes after 59 (fiffy-nine)?” or he would skip over numbers (one day, he missed every single “7” number between 106 and 198).  In the last few days, he has asked for very little prompts in the counting and has missed very few numbers.  In the process, his overall vocabulary has also gotten better.

That said, when he does start counting, I can’t wait for him to get to the thirties, which he pronounces, “furty-one, furty-two, furty-fee, etc..”  I kind of can’t wait until he makes it to “fee-hundred and furty-fee.” (His high is fee-hundred.)

And he counts all the time…He’ll spend the entire car ride to school counting or I’ll hear him just walking around the house counting.  In the last day or two, he started counting things like steps.

One night last week, he had a rare midnight accident in his bed and with Andrea out of town, I let him sleep in my bed instead of trying to change sheets in the middle of the night.  As we were both trying to fall back asleep, he started counting and we both drifted off rather quickly…It was nice to fall asleep to his sleepy little voice counting numbers.  Very sweet.