Counting to 10!

Last week (on June 24th), Eli counted to 10 by himself for the first time!

Prior to that day, Eli had been able to count to 3, and had been able to count a couple of numbers in a row (in particular, he would say “8! 9!” after hearing someone say “7”). But yesterday, Eli counted all the way from 1 to 10! He started with “1”, and Missy, Missy’s mom, and I repeated “1” after him. Eli went on to “2”, we repeated “2”, and to our surprise, Eli continued all the way up to 10! (And it was indeed Eli saying the number first and the rest of us repeating after him, not the other way around!) :-)

Eli is starting to understand the concepts behind the numbers, too. The next morning, Eli was in his high chair eating breakfast with Missy. Eli had his sippy cup in front of him, and he reached out for Missy’s cup as well (“Pease! Pease!”), and Missy gave it to him. When he had both cups in front of him, Eli said “two cups”! And that was all by himself, with no prompting (or talking about numbers at all beforehand) from Missy!