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Those look like lovely resources. Thanks SAHM! I'll be sure to look into both.

Update: Age 22 months (new media)

Books:
- I Can Tell by Touching
- The Gruffalo's Child
- One Cool Friend
- Run, Turkey, Run!
- Fire, Fire (Gail Gibbons) -- a detailed description of fire fighting procedures in a variety of locations (city, country, park, offshore)
- I See Myself
- Baby Brains
- Golden Books-- Saggy Baggy Elephant, Scuffy the Tugboat, Chipmunk's ABC, The Bunny Book, Goodnight Little Bear
- How Many Teeth?
- My Noisy Body
- Bear Snores On -- a sweet fictional story that introduces the concept of hibernation
- Pete the Cat: Pete's Big Lunch
- Stone Soup
- Bats in the Library
- ETA: The "I Wonder Why" series by Kingfisher

Toys:
- Duplo and Mega Bloks-- the favorites this month.
We play with these for about 3 hours every day lately. DS has an easier time building independently with Mega Bloks but enjoys making his own new "toys" out of both sets of blocks. We need at least another set of each to make the more ambitious projects that he wants to build.
- ETA: City Blocks (set of 200 uniform wood blocks). I bought these at a consignment shop and they're terrific for making complex structures. DS is on a real construction kick.

Electronic media:
- Nothing new. We were watching too many videos (~1-1.5 hours/day), so I've cut him back here.
- His enjoyment of the controlled Starfall readers was heightened when I loaded the browser "Rover" onto the iPad. Rover is flash enabled, which allows us to access the full Starfall suite in a touchpad format.

At that age my son really liked a book called Just One More Swim. It is about a polar bear teaching her cubs to swim. The unabridged version is much better than the abridged version.

Off Go Their Engines, Off Go Their Lights is a nice vehicle bedtime book for younger kids. Fewer words than Good Night Good Night Construction Site but similar idea.

For kids very comfortable with the food chain, One Small Place by the Sea and One Small Place in a Tree are nice.

Kids who like Magnetic Mighty Minds may also like Block Buddies.

Oh, if you have a vehicle loving child, Hop Aboard! is the best Richard Scarry book I have seen. It doesn't really have much in the way of stories, just page after page of detailed drawings of vehicles with a short sentence about a boy and his dog Flip... My son can spend a long time just staring at the pages.

Shortly after age 2, the Pop Up Space Facts and Pop Up Dinosaur Facts books from Barnes and Noble became winners here. They are pretty fragile but he still pulls them out about once a week close to a year later. Around 2.5 we were reading them repeatedly for hours daily. These books are meaty and I think targeted for 8 year olds but if you have a kid who loves the subject matter and pop up books, it is worth considering.

Aquinas I could never get Reading Eggs working properly on Rover. I never bothered trying anything else after that assumed anything with mouse over contet would fail. Starfall works? Also, we now have the Starfall app that has all (or much of) the original free contet.

SAHM, I love those suggestions. I just bought a Robert Sabuda dinosaur pop-up encyclopedia for DS' 2nd birthday, which is coming up in short order. We're definitely on the same wavelength! As always, your thoughtful suggestions are greatly appreciated!

More generally, I've been doing some Christmas and birthday shopping and will be excited to review DS' response to some of the new equipment, which includes:

- A balance and calibrated weight set
- A scale
- Baby soda test tubes and plastic beakers
- A prism
- A magnetic wand
- A 10x tripod magnifier
- Expanding water beads
- The sequel to the book "Mouse makes Words", I believe called "Mouse's hidden words"
- An easel
- A tool work bench

Yup, we've managed to run the entire Starfall subscription on the iPad. I bit the bullet and spent the $35 for full access, which was a good decision. DS adores Starfall and asks for it several times each day. He derives considerably more independence and enjoyment from being able to use a touch interface.

There's a nice section under the "Learn to Read" books (also in an app) that has full-in-the-blank spaces to form words. That's a favourite game. Funnily, he still can't always drag and drop a letter across the screen, so he'll instruct me on what to do. Mum is a glorified computer mouse!

It might be that an old bug was fixed in Rover...who knows?

if you don't mind me asking, what is your daily routine with your little one? what activities do you do on a daily basis?

thanks for the rover tip - we have a subscription to starfall - DS3 used it all the time (it's really too easy for the most part now, even though he still enjoys playing around on some of the songs, etc). we first got it when he was a little before 2 and it was a great buy. i wish i had known about rover back then!

i do wish starfall went beyond 1st grade stuff - i love the setup. either way, i will definitely show DS3months when he is old enough to be interested in it

random pseudo-related question...does anyone know of kids foreign language websites, akin to starfall? DS would LOVE a french site - he speaks some french, esp. numbers (his nana is fluent) and i think a starfall-esque french site (or any languages, really) would be a bit hit over here.

These look great! We want to play at your house. :-)

A couple things to think about adding over the next year if you don't have them in your list of toys yet... A simple sewing measuring tape and a digital watch.

My son loves to measure anything... The measuring tape is small and packs well. He also loves our tape measure from my husband's toolbox but I prefer the little fabric one.

He picked up telling time on a digital clock at some point this year from the clocks around the house and me telling him that we were going somewhere at a certain time or leaving in 5 minutes etc. He loves wearing a watch and it has headed off some tantrums to let him tell me what time it is and how much time we have left.

And maps... My son loves the world map. This one grew out of his love for the solar system and earth.