Kit and I revised the bedtime book again today, since it had been a while and they've explained more to me about how they feel at night. It turns out they're more lonely than scared, so we've been working on specific techniques to address that, like talking to their stuffed animals or to the sound that woke them up ("Silly heat pipes! You're so noisy! We'll call a plumber for you!"), and I wanted to update the book to reflect that.

When I asked whether they wanted to work on our book together, they immediately ran to get some paper from the printer and a pen. They propped the paper on the couch, took pen in left hand (they're firmly a lefty, as we always suspected they would be), and began to "write": long looping scribble-waves, drawn fluidly from right to left, that look like a cartoon of writing. As they "wrote", they narrated what each page said.

I was floored, honestly. I've never seen them do anything like that. They went on for pages! I photocopied the two that were most densely written on and added them to the printout of the book. (Then I had to stop Kit from poking buttons on the printer, as they hadn't seen me use it as a copier before and were very intrigued.) Kit wrote them as part of the book and I felt they should be included verbatim. I didn't catch much of their narration, but one thing that was clear was "my grownups come back to me", so I made sure to add that to the book's text as well.

Later I showed the pages to J. "What does this say?" he asked Kit. " 'I love you,' " they answered. We melted.

Today they also traced a very credible straight line on one of their write-and-wipe drawing pages. And they pointed to Daniel Tiger's 5-Minute Stories and said "I want a 5 story, please". They got very shy when I asked them to confirm that they recognized the big "5" on the cover, but that's fine, we've been through their shyness with speech and I know they'll keep practicing until they feel confident. It feels like real reading and writing are suddenly just around the corner. So exciting!