Real Counting and Potato Chip Subtraction

Miss Bug has been counting (roughly to 11) for a while now, in that memorized way that children do, without reference to what the numbers mean. More recently, I saw her move to the stage where she properly identified two things. She will carefully arrange her fingers so she's holding up two on each hand, which most adults read as four, but she has her own math language right now. Then, she carefully points to the pair of objects and declares, "Two things! It is two." There was one, two, and many.

Then last week she got to three. She carefully points to each of the three buttons on my shirt, properly counting them and declaring the sum of three. I believe experts say she doesn't fully understand the abstract concept of counting, and believes that each object is being named one, two or three. Whatever is going on, it's a developmental change from her previous stage. Yesterday she counted a row of 7 dots, and though she counted "wrong" because she missed some and concluded that the total was 5, it sure looked like like she understood the task she was trying to tackle. This is all very interesting to observe, and fun to see how it happens without concerted instruction. (However, there's tons of PBS and counting books in our home, plus some nuclear physics for good measure.)

Here's another "how it happened" story. Subtraction: 
We ordered Panera for dinner, which comes with a yummy bag of bad-for-you potato chips as a side. Ladybug saw Daddy's bag of chips and wanted to dig in. Wanting to be fair, yet teach moderation, I said, "How about three chips? You can have three." And I counted them out for her very dramatically. She was appeased (thank god, cause tantrums suck). And she really relished those chips, and talked about how there were three of them. Then, about ten minutes later, she surprised me by announcing, "Now Lady has two chips!" And it was so. Three chips, toddler eats one, equals two chips. So I parroted this back to her, validating her claim. Later, this continued with, "Now Lady has one chip. She does have one chip." 

Although she wasn't watching this video  the day of the potato chip subtraction, I suspect she took her cue from this song, "Elmo's Ducks" where Elmo counts down from four ducks to none. I totally let her watch YouTube videos as a guilty pleasure in the late afternoons, or when I'm trying to have a conversation that isn't interrupted by me being climbed on. So here we are, that's the story of how Ladybug started to subtract.