Return of the Blogger

After blogging 31 days in October, I guess I needed a break! All that blogging coupled with the fact that the end of October and beginning of November have been a bit rough for me means we're into the second week of November and I haven't written a thing. I'll go ahead and remedy that now.
I've not been at my best, but Nathan's been great. The Fall flus and colds have not hit him yet and he's just been a happy, active kid. He does persist in wanting the same activities over and over again. He's still really into this Leapfrog learning desk toy I talked about before. It has these word cards with pictures on them. You're supposed to put magnetic letters in them, but Nathan doesn't believe the letters belong in the cards at all. If I put them in, he takes them out. He does believe the cards belong arranged all around the desk, not in a stack, so that he can see all the pictures, and he arranges them around himself without too much overlap:

What's neat is that he is looking at the pictures and telling me which word is on the card. I know he's not reading the letters, he's labeling the pictures, but it's still really cool. He can do a bunch of them: "dog", "cat", "pig", "sun", "rug". This toy sounds out and spells the words when the card is placed in the reader. Nathan is beginning to memorize the spellings: he's got "D-O-G" down, but for some reason he generally tells me "C-O-T" for cat. I guess I'll cut him a break, though-- he's only 3!
The bummer here is that while he is proficient at taking cards out of the reader, he cannot yet put them in by himself, so this is a labor-intensive toy on the part of mommy, especially when he wants to hear the spelling of each card in turn.
I'm not so sure that these learning toys really teach anybody anything more about reading and phonics than, say, good old-fashioned books, but he does love this thing.