If you’re at all familiar with Starfall the title of this post should be familiar. Especially if your kid is anything like mine and likes to see Starfall fifty.times.a.day. And then, even when he’s not watching it, he’s walking around going, “BUH! I EH GO GETCHU BEE! BUH!”

The Boy posting a bird on his learning poster.

This week’s theme according to Letter of the Week was supposed to be the jungle. I couldn’t bring myself, in this weather, to talk about the warmth that is the jungle. So, we changed things up a bit and went with penguins and the color blue. The Boy loves this because penguins means we get to watch Happy Feet! And Happy Feet just happens to be the most potent form of toddler crack that this house has to offer. Only being rivaled byFinding Nemo, Elmo, and (collective parental shiver here) Barney.

That big, purple dinosaur that is responsible for such horrifyingly catchy (and stupid) tunes as, “Hey Mr. Knickerbocker boppity bop, I like-a the way that you boppity bop” (Did I just get that stuck in your head? Good, because misery loves needs requires company and there is nothing more miserable than a mom with a kid who loves Barney, but I digress). That big, purple kill-me-sort-of-annoying dinosaur is a regular in our house this week. Why? Because I made the mistake of letting Ben choose a DVD beginning with B. Before I got the flash of “OMG, HE MIGHT CHOOSE THAT BARNEY DVD RIGHT THERE! HIDE IT!”, he had already grabbed it and was running down the Children’s Library hallway hollering, “BARNEYYYYYYYYYYY!”

Learning poster – B Version.

See that ice? The ball? And bear? And bird? And bicycle…ish…thing? I made those and the rest. I can’t tell you how cool it is when my kid can look at those construction paper monstrosities and actually know what they’re supposed to represent. He does, however, continue calling the bicycle a motorcycle, which I blame entirely on his father for putting it in his head with a, “THAT’s a bicycle?! It looks like a motorcycle…sort of…thing.” Thank you, Mr. Helpful.

Just as last week, he’s flying through this full speed. B says Buh. 2 is…well…2. He’s got square down, penguin in Spanish, ice is cold and ball, bear, bird and bicycle (-ish thing) begins with B. The only thing he doesn’t quite have yet is color. It’s such an abstract thing that I can’t think of anything other than, “this is blue, that is blue, this is red” to help teach him what it is. The mere fact that he knows that blue is a color is awesome but I can’t say that I don’t worry a little. He picks everything else up so quickly, I wonder why not this.

With his vocabulary, it’s often hard to remember that he’s only a year and a half. He acts so much older and speaks so much older, it’s easy to forget that he’s still got quite a long time to learn these things and, sincerely, it’s not that big of a worry. He will pick it up, one way or the other.