Reading! but not really writing

Warning: this whole post gets a mom-brag alert. Move along if you're not in the mood.

Adam is kinda reading. We've known for a while that he has whole-word recognition of many (100s of?) familiar words and phrases, notably streets and signs, subway stations, countries, food packaging, and words from his books. He's also been doing a decent job at guessing (often correctly) at a lot of words by sounding out short ones or keying in on the first few and last few letters of a long one or identifying roots.

For example, Dr. Lindzon was a little surprised when Adam guessed that the sticker he gave him said "Buffalo" when in fact it said "Beautiful." I didn't know he'd even heard of a buffalo. He's also mistaken "peau" for "Peru" but he got Millwood on his first try. I'm sure Dion has more examples, too. And yes, he has his favourite books all but memorised: he reads them to the babies (dolls), Olga, and Naomi all the time. But he has the meaning, too, because he makes "good" mistakes, e.g., replacing pronouns with the appropriate proper noun, using appropriate synonyms, never messing up the part of speech.

Still, I was a little surprised when he had memorised / could read back one of his birthday cards when I read it to him only once. So, when the next one arrived, I let him try it without any assistance. And he read thusly:

Adam's version	Original text
Hey, Birthday Boy	Hey, Birthday Boy
You're growing up to be fast,	You're growing up fast,
So get seat for something	So get set for some fun
Help your birthday's a [indiscernible]	Hope your birthday's a blast!

That's pretty good, I think.

He's also into figuring out how to spell familiar words. And he's on to the trickiness of spelling. For example, he's asked whether the letter at the end of cookie is e or y and whether a letter should be J or G, S or C, C or K. He also knows some letter combinations, e.g., CH and TH. Again, there are some amusing guesses. He thought drink (or some other dr-word) started with a J.

His books that are in heavy rotation: Llama Llama Mad at Mama (Dewdney), Little Pea (Crouse-Rosenthal), Duck in a Truck (Alborough), David Gets in Trouble (Shannon), Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (Viorst), I'm A Big Brother (blanking), Christmas Carols (STILL), and several Robert Munsch books.

But. He's not into writing (or drawing or coloring) for himself, though he is an enthusiastic spectator and actually he's a mini writing-drill-seargent. The only thing he ever writes is 1 - the numeral one. Sometimes he makes circles instead of random scribbling. And it's not that he lacks the deterity for writing. Trust me. You do not want to set him loose in your house with a screwdriver.

However, I did discover this morning that he had scribbled on a patch of wall; luckily, it was done in pencil. He even had the temerity to ask me to find him a pencil to do more writing on the wall. He got a talking to. Who knows if it'll work? This is the proverbial coming around of my going around as a preschooler. I had a compulsion to colour on the walls and furniture in crayon. I remember the angel and devil on my shoulders. I knew I would be punished. But I also knew that no punishment could outweigh the sheer joy of putting crayon to wall. I remember my parents scrubbing my bedroom for hours as we prepared to move when I was six. I need some kind of concluding sentence about Adam but I'm blocked. Leave your suggestions in the comments.