Updates
Child is talking up a storm! He's suddenly capable of mimicry, so everything I say becomes fodder for conversation. I heard a lot of down and out (ha!) today as we made our way through a couple of stores today with Jackson in the stroller. He's also saying book and back over and over again (and trying to figure out the meaning of back, which seems to have so many definitions!)

The poor kiddo spit up in the car today for the first time in...ever. He's hardly ever thrown up, even when he was little, so I think his tummy really didn't get along with either peach-flavored YoBaby yogurt, or the combo of YoBaby and his regular milk. (His cousin's mom left a snack pack of YoBaby yogurt at our house so we've been using them up the past couple of days.) Long story short, it got all over his car seat, so I now have the undesirable and intimidating task of deconstructing a Britax seat, washing the cover, scrub down the seat belts and then, somehow, putting it all back together correctly and safely. Pray for me.

Today was the first time I've been shopping all week, so of course we hit the used bookstore. We also went to the Borders going-out-of-business sale. Man, Borders has been my store since...high school? I'm really sad to see it go. Anyway, I wanted to snag some slightly-discounted basic Kumon workbooks that I know we'll be using next year. I'll go back in about a month when the real discounts kick in and if there are any of the higher-level Kumon workbooks still available, I may stock up. I am a Kumon fangirl! Anyway, here are today's gleanings from Goodwill:

 

(1) The Jar of Fools: Eight Hannukah Stories from Chelm, (2) All About Corduroy, (3) Kindergarten Brain Quest, (4) Where Is Baby's Pumpkin?, (5) Colors & Shapes: Lift-a-Flap Fun, plus (6) the Disney Magna Doodle pictured above and (7) the card puzzle set pictured above.

(1) We already have a fools of Chelm book, and a couple volumes of Hannukah storybooks, but if some is good, more must be better. Right? OK not necessarily, but I do like being able to add anything to our library that can inform J about his Jewish heritage.

(2) The like-new condition All About Corduroy combines the original Corduroy story by Don Freeman with the sequel A Pocket for Corduroy. We already owned both in mismatched formats, but I like this larger edition better than what we have now, plus the single volume seems tidier!

(3) I've never actually gotten to look at these Brain Quest cards before, but after seeing these I came away with a generally good impression of the brand. For one thing, this is well-engineered in that the cards are hinged together so you don't have to play 52-card pickup all the time, and for another, I enjoyed the content. The questions at this level consist of lots of analogies and find-the-difference puzzles, as well as vocabulary quizzes. It's basically a kind of critical thinking Trivial Pursuit. This set is years ahead of where Jackson is, so this was sort of an exploratory purchase, but I might well use these in some capacity (probably as travel entertainment) when we get in the vicinity of kindergarten.

(4) I don't love Karen Katz books (among other things her octopi have nine legs!), but Jackson likes lifting the flap so into the Halloween box this goes!

(5) Colors. Shapes. Flaps. Sold!

(6) I just read someone's suggestion about having a Magna Doodle on hand so you can write with toddlers without your house getting covered in baby graffiti (since the little ones can't reliably wield pens). A new Magna Doodle seemed to be too expensive at Amazon, but lo and behold, I found a Disney Channel book that had the above Magna Doodle attached at the top. The original purpose of the book was to teach drawing and it was just not my speed (not least because I'm trying to minimize the marketing power of the mighty Mouse on my kid), but I used an X-acto knife to cut off the book, and voila. (The personalization pictured above was a surprise from daddy!)

(7) This Early Learning Puzzle kit made by Spice Box in Canada was an unexpected surprise. It's in very good condition, which may mean it's a total dud and never got played with, but I'm optimistic. There are 78 two-piece puzzles split into three sets: alphabet, opposites and numbers. I particularly like that the number cards demonstrate what I recently learned are called number bonds for the numbers up to 10. For example, the four 9 puzzles show the possible ways to combine other whole numbers to get 9 are 8+1, 7+2, 6+3 and 5+4. I'm hopeful that this will be a fun activity once Jackson's fine motor control gets a little stronger.

And now I'm gonna go back to sleep. I've been up the past couple of hours with kiddo, who wants a bottle or a baboon or some combination thereof.