I've always known about Leonardo DaVinci's backwards writing.   It's still debated why he did this, to amuse himself, to keep people from easily reading his notes, or because he was a dyslexic genius. But I do know that when he wrote for other people, he wrote correctly.  It was just in his notes and journals intended only for his eye that he wrote backward.

The Caterpillar has reached a phase where she is really, REALLY interested in reading and writing.  She has been able to sound out small words for awhile now, but it takes her some time.  It's interesting because when The Dormouse started to read, she had a little bit of help from her parents and teachers with C-A-T and P-I-G, but then just came home one day knowing how to read. It astounded us all. But in the area of righting, she was slow to develop those skills.  She hated to write - said it hurt her hand - we had to encourage her and push her to practice it.  Eventually she got the fine motor control required to form letters on paper, but to this day, still hates to write anything more than a sentence.

The Caterpillar, however, cannot stop writing.  Everywhere we go, she leaves a trail of small pieces of paper with four-year-old style letters written across them. The other day, she came to me with her doodle board and said, "What does this say, Momma?"

She'd written Fisher Price Doodle Pro across the board in letters so neat I thought maybe she'd asked me to write it for her and I'd forgotten. Then I realized in tiny, tiny letters at the bottom of the toy, the brand name was in the corner of the board and she'd copied it.

Yesterday, she wrote this:


The interesting thing is not that she figured out how to write the word hotel; The KingofHearts gave her the letters for that when she asked him.  The interesting thing is that she was writing it for The KingofHearts, who was standing on the other side of the paper, to see.  So she wrote this from the top of the paper and upside down and backwards to her (correct to him).  

I can't begin to guess what this means, but I'm hoping she'll invent a bunch of cool stuff -- and I hope at least one of those things is a flying car.