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This excited me, BBDad, because my late dad is the only other person I've known who did this! He'd do puzzles of several thousand pieces and never, ever look at the picture--he sorted all the pieces by shape first, and then off to the races...which drove my mum goofy, as she is a colour-first puzzler--but between the two of them, they did lots of puzzles together every year. (One year, I found one that was all white--he loved it!)

We always started a great big one together on Boxing Day...sorry, irrelevant trip down memory lane here...but I still get a little misty when something reminds me of my much-missed Pop.

Cherish your little shape-sorter!

peace
minnie

DS7 has always loved the "I Spy" and "Where's Waldo" books, too. And his strength according to testing is pattern recognition. So there you go, I guess...

I don't really know how he works puzzles, but he also doesn't do edges first.

LOL. That's a good one Dottie.

One, we have many of those wooden "Melissa and David" puzzles, which DD 25 mos. adores and totally nails without mistakes.

I got her a large scale, 25 piece dinosaur jigsaw puzzle for this year and the whole jigsaw thing does not appeal to her nearly as much as the fascinating creatures depicted on the puzzle. She can look at a solitary piece and find its image on the small picture of the puzzle, but she has no plans of assemling it herself.

I think she thinks it's a poorly constructed or otherwise broken rug: she cannot wait to stand on it when I'm putting it together on the floor.

My mother tells me I was a puzzle freak, but never jigsaw.

Oops. DD begged to do the puzzles again and, when she got to the 9 piece jigsaw puzzle I said, "That one is too hard for you." No it's not, she said. "It's too hard: it's a jigsaw puzzle," I said. No, it's a *train* puzzle, she said. Anyway, she did it swiftly. I opened up the large-scale 25 piece dinosaur jigsaw puzzle again and she could do that, too, all by photo pattern recognition with the "map." I stand corrected (by my toddler).

seablue: Do you find that almost overnight she has a mental growth? I hope that makes sense but I really don't know how else to describe it. DD's play seems to be even more intense here lately and shows even more cognitive understanding on her part. Yesterday it was her usual imaginary play but today it was to a whole new level.

My DS5 enjoys puzzles but is not an avid puzzler. In part I think I didn't expose him to puzzles all that often b/c I'm not wild about puzzles myself. It is funny though about trying to teach approaches to puzzling. I definitely encourage DS to "sort" his puzzles, finding corners, edges, parts of the picture, etc. I should probably just leave him alone!

It's funny too b/c when he was tested recently the psychologist said he did something she's never seen a child do before. During the puzzles section on the WPPSI, when he got to the last puzzle, he was moving pieces around. After a minute, he got frustrated and just flipped all the pieces over to the white side with no picture, then quickly put the puzzle together and flipped it back over, all in one piece. She was really suprised, since she'd never seen a child do that before and she said she was also surprised that it worked! I guess there are all kinds of ways to do a puzzle!

DS5 does LOVE, LOVE Legos, which I suppose are kind of a 3D puzzle.

KatelynsMom, I often think of you and how you describe Katelyn... yes, there is a lot of mental growth (and her legs grew!) at 25 mos. DH and I are having some trouble characterizing it. It doesn't seem to be easily quantifiable like how many words can she say sort of thing.

I called a preschool to discuss enrollment and was discouraged to learn that DD will not be allowed into most 3 year old preschool classes until Sept. 2010, when she'll be nearly four, since she's a December baby. They mentioned the jump from "parallel play to cooperative play." Well, she's in full cooperative mode.

Last week we went to the bank and DD made a bee-line to another toddler who was there with her parents. "Hi, what's your name? Want to see my baby doll?" she said. They sang the alphabet song together and took off exploring the bank while everyone in the building watched. At one point, the other little girl, age 3.5, said, "She's not sharing" so we patiently explained that DD 25 mos. is still young and does not have any siblings to share with. DD looked at me, looked at the little girl and said, "Oh. I'll share. Here you go, would you like this?" and proceeded to play the rest of the time in full share mode.

So that's what we really see, I guess, interpersonal stuff, imagination, playing make-believe for hours, scary memory, and making logical connections. Am I making any sense?

My DD is 29mo now and in the last few months it's been the same thing- she's made these intangible leaps. I'm not sure what "normal" is at this age, but her imaginative play has also taken off and she mostly just needs an explanation to get her to do something she doesn't want to- as opposed to the tantrums she was having when thwarted. But, really, it's not so much the things she does as the things she suddenly understands and the questions she asks. She's been on this kick where she's really interested in what can live in water and what can't, constant questions about can people live in water, can our dog live in water, etc. (Yesterday she got mad at DS4 and DS7 and yelled "Brothers, you *both* live underwater!" like it was an insult, lol). She asked why we can't see the moon and stars when the sun is out and then was fascinated that our sun was a star too. Weird, crazy, questions that I've never had a 2yo ask me before. I'm sure they're common around here, but the boys never asked things like that at 2. And she gets this look in her eyes when I'm talking to her sometimes that just completely freaks me out, it's like she just *understands* things in ways I can't even begin to fathom.

LOL... it makes perfect sense to me since that is DD. Yesterday her grandparents brought her an Accordion. So today she was playing with it and told us we need to eat ice cream while she plays. She remembered being in an Italian buffet about a month or two back where we had finished lunch and had ice cream when a woman came in and played the Accordion for us. We haven't discussed it since that day or even when they gave it to her yesterday, but she remembers.

And I feel your frustration with preschool. They go by age not ability. So frustrating. DD will be one of the youngest in her class when she starts in the fall but she is already at the level of a kindergartener with her abilities so hopefully she will just find the fun of play with the group and not be bored. I chose not to mention what she can do and just wait and see how she does in the class. Since it is a playbase program we might not have any problems.