Laughing at The Letter Show

Paxton knew his ABC's by the time he was 15 months old. At 18 months he could identify every letter of the alphabet in no particular order. We had all of these fridge magnet letters and you would say to him, "Paxie, go find mommy the X," and he would run in there and grab it and bring it to you. Everyone who witnessed it couldn't believe it.

He also has an incredible memory for numbers and vocabulary. It would always shock strangers in the grocery store, for instance, when he was a baby and people would ask how old he was. This little boy would say, "Um 16 months." And then when he was 17 months and 18 months and so on, he knew that too.

I am pretty sure Paxton has a photographic memory. This doesn't surprise me because I do too. People have always thought I was smart because I did well in school. It wasn't because I was smart, necessarily, I just have a really good memory so I did well on tests. As a result of his photographic memory, Paxton has pretty much every book that we own memorized. And I'm not talking the short little dinky books. I am talking the Bearnstein Bears and Dr. Seuss books. EVERY ONE OF THEM! To the point if you say the instead of that he will correct you. Because of this he has been able to read since he was barely 4. He knows quite a lot of site words and can sound things out bizarrely well.

Because of all of this I forget he is just a little 4 year old boy sometimes. Our Pediatrician in OKC always used to tell me, "Since Pax is so verbal you will always have to remind people that he is only 3 or only 4. Emotionally he is just a little boy." I do have to remind myself of this from time to time, but he does a good job or reminding me of this too. He is a silly little boy. He gets his giggle box turned on and can't turn it off. This gets me to laughing, which gets Charlotte and Porter laughing and then we are all cracking up and half the time me and the other kids don't even know why.

Tonight we were watching Wheel of Fortune. My sis and I have always loved The Wheel and because of Paxton's love of letters he has always loved it too. He was just a little boy and would ask if we "could watch the letter show." For some reason the dummy's could not figure out the puzzles tonight. One of the before and after puzzles was "Just in the nick of time magazine." This guy guesses "just in the nick of time machine." WRONG! I see Paxton's eyebrows narrow and can tell he is concentrating really hard and then he says, "just in the nick of time ham sandwich." WHAT?!?!?! I start cracking up, he starts cracking up, the other two join in, and we are laughing until we cry for about 5 minutes. I don't know why I thought that was so funny, but we laughed on and off about that ham sandwich comment the rest of the night. He was really proud of himself for making everyone laugh.

Everyone is good at something. Some people are good at sports, some people are good with tools, some people are good at art. Paxton is good with words and numbers, but he could care less. What he wants to be is funny!