Puzzles!

Elle LOVES playing with her Melissa and Doug puzzles. We got the number, farm and fish peg puzzles and she has mastered them all. She knows all her animals and has surprised us one day with being able to to identify/recognize the numbers and some the different colors! I only let her work with one new puzzle at a time and do not give her a new one until she has mastered it. Since she has nailed all three puzzles, I recently got her the Melissa and Doug USA map sound puzzle from Yoyo.com. We originally got a defective one in which the sound wasn't working. Yoyo.com had us keep the defective one and sent me a brand new one. I thought the puzzle is a little bit too advanced for her age (she was 18 months when I got it) so I haven't opened the new one yet but let her play with the defective one. We would play with it leisurely and I would point out the different states but did not really expect her to remember them. Well, she proved me wrong. The very first state that she was able to identify and placed correctly on the puzzle was Hawaii! :-). Daddy Jarbs was not surprised! Second state was Alaska! I was amazed that she can actually single out the Hawaii and Alaska puzzle pieces among all the puzzle pieces!

This weekend, she surprised us yet again. We were working on the puzzle and we were blown away when she knew where to put California, Arizona, Texas, Florida and North Dakota on the puzzle! I busted out my camera a little bit too late so I was only able to record her working on North Dakota (first part of the video) and Florida (1:11 min mark). You can hear our reaction when Elle knew were to put N. Dakota on the map. You can see that she grabbed the puzzle piece herself and placed it correctly on the map without us telling her where it should go.