Blocks in Box

My mother got Ben a subscription to the magazine "Babybug," which Ben loves. The latest issue has a little story about Ned (a toddler) and his mother putting various things into boxes. Yesterday, Neil got out Ben's box of animals and also a bag of alphabet blocks. Ben was standing around pondering these things, and Neil idly commented, "Ned puts blocks in the red box," a direct quote from the Babybug story. Ben alerted to this, walked over to the magazine sitting on the coffee table, flipped through it until he found the story about Ned, and then held it up and showed it to Neil.

We introduced Ben to books very early on. We would hold him on our lap and flip through a board book, pointing to objects, sometimes reading some of the words. At first he didn't pay attention for long, and we didn't press the matter. But we continued to read books with him, modeling how to hold the book, how to turn the pages, etc. And by the time he was three or four months old, he loved books -- he would turn the pages himself, stare intently at the pictures, and follow along as we pointed to the words while reading. As he got older, books became a great way to introduce vocabulary to him, especially after his CI activation.