Mini walking encyclopedia

Little Bitty can often be heard rattling off all kinds of animal facts and figures.

“Sea turtoos… way eggs on wand!” (sea turtles lay eggs on land)
“Da anaconda… is wuh-da wargest snakes… in da wer’d” (the anaconda is one of the largest snakes in the world)

I have lost track of how many different animal flash cards and books he has. A couple of weeks ago, he was playing with the Wii and kept clicking on the “photo channel” and getting upset that there were no pictures. I offered to download some animal pictures for him so he’d have something to look at (we look them up together on Google Images). Ever since then he wants to look up new ones every day, and our “Wii ah’mals” collection now includes over 400 pictures.

He has branched out from farm animals and household pets, and he’s developed an appreciation for all animals – woodland animals, desert animals, ocean animals, arctic animals, jungle animals, insects, the list goes on. He’s asking me for pictures of animals I’d barely heard of before – a “Ura-peeya adder” (European Adder, a snake for those who are like me and had no idea what that was), “free-toe swoff” (three-toed sloth), “ekih-na” (echidna) are just a few of them.

I love the way he gets excited about seeing them… even the most, um, unattractive (to me) animal pictures are met with a huge grin and a “ee’s berry cute!” from Bitty.

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On a related note, Bitty is not only a walking animal encyclopedia, but sometimes he’s a very cute little dictionary too. When dh and I went to visit his class for their end of year party, the class sang a couple of songs they’d learned and then joined the parents to watch a slideshow of pictures from the school year. As Bitty walked up to me, he said (looking around at all the parents), “a cwowd… iss a wahj gwoop of peepooh”

It took me a minute before it clicked.

“A crowd is a large group of people?” I asked him.

He looked back at me and nodded.

“Do we have a crowd here?”

He nodded again with a shy grin :).

3runningcircles

I’m a mom of three boys on the autism spectrum — 11-yr-old id twins and their 7-yr-old little brother — and wife to my dh of 19 yrs who is a SAHD. My blog is where I share our story, as well as topics relating to autism awareness & acceptance, twins, the silliness three little boys can get into, and whatever else is on my mind. Hopefully some of what we’ve learned over the years is helpful to others (or at least entertaining).