Counting

We're all about counting things these days. Toy dinosaurs. Hugs. Times tossing a ball. And along the way, Fiona is figuring out a few things about numbers. Doing things ten times has become common. Doing things twenty times is a treat. Doing something more than twenty times--well, that depends on her parents' patience/availability at any given point.

She can count to twenty entirely on her own... almost. For some reason, she frequently skips over 15. But what's extra weird about that is that when she does skip over 15, her counting gets completely screwy: "11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20!" When she is prompted to put 15 after 14, she can then proceed straight through correctly "14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20!"

Where it gets exciting is to count beyond twenty. Here she needs help, but not too much. She says "27, 28, 29" (actually, we do this together, because Fiona always wants a counting partner) and then I'll say "30" and Fiona will repeat "30." And then she can start right in on "31, 32, 33." For a while she'd say something like "thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, thirty-ten," but when I'd correct her with "forty" she quickly figured out what was going on. She even told me "you never get to ten," as a way of explaining how counting works once you get into bigger numbers.

We go all the way up to 100, and when she asks to do more I announce that "100 is a pretty big number!" Once she figures out that the numbers repeat after 100 we'll be counting to 200, 300 and beyond, and there is a limit to the excitement I can feign for counting. But we did count to 100 four different times on the walk to the playground this weekend, not to mention all the times I got ten hugs and ten kisses before saying good-bye or good night.