Emerging Literacy

Often time I tell my sister stories about my kid, her response is I love emerging literacy. She knows all terms because of her PhD efforts in education psychology. So here are the latest stories, recorded for posterity.
First off sometimes when I'm trying to use the computer my son gets obsessed with trying to find the J on the keyboard. Especially when I tell him I'm talking (chatting) to daddy. Once he has the J he usually is interested in other important letters like the S, etc.
He loves to "write" there is a clear difference between his drawing pictures or coloring pictures and the "words" he has written with markers.
A few weeks ago he got this little card and wrote on it. It had his words on it, he carried it around for a day, when he said, "mom read this". (I had no idea how to read what he wrote.)
He still likes looking at board books, with one picture and one word on each page. (He has a varied taste from infant books, up to chapter books.) In an effort to get him to suck his thumb less in my presence I started having him "read" the one word per page books to me. By this age he obviously know what a banana is, or what a flower is, and other simple objects.
The other day he got a bunch of little one word books at his cousin's house and said, "mom read this". I said how about you read them to me, then his cousin who is about 14 months younger than him came up, and wanted to join in the action, so I said how about you read them to her, that would be so big of you to read to her. He "read" the books, he had never seen before.
I thought all of this was uneventful until the next day we were reading a book with more than one word per page, but none the less he could "help" me read it, by filling in what each animal is on the page, then I read the description. Well this apparently opened up a whole new world to him, because I found him in his room later that day, "reading" the same book. It is about a caterpillar that is trying to figure out what he will grow up to be. I heard my kid says, a lion, no, flip the page, a bear, no, flip the page, etc, a butterfly, yea!! I was so proud, it was the first time I had heard him read a book out loud with words I understand. Who knew I was emerging his literacy until after I heard him read, I'm a Little Caterpillar. I will have to remember November 18, 2008 was the day my son "read" his first book.