Acrobatics

James and Daddy went to our Little Gym class again yesterday. We learned how to do this:

Dinner conversation

James is sharing his opinion. On what, we're not sure.

Developing good habits (hopefully)

James has been doing much better eating and sleeping lately. We were having tremendous trouble getting him to eat solid foods, but since we got back home after Christmas he has improved tremendously. He will now sit down and eat three full meals a day, and he snacks a lot between meals (cheese and pretzels, mostly). It sometimes takes him a while to stop playing and start eating, but he will eventually eat. Before, we would often sit at the table for an hour with no success.

Another wonderful development is that James is now sleeping through the night most of the time. This is especially wonderful to Daddy, who was getting up with him several times a night, every night. The weird thing is that he just decided to do it on his own. For weeks we had been trying every variation to his sleeping routine and environment that we could think of - changing the temperature, moving back his bedtime, giving him a bottle right before bed - and none of them worked. Daddy gave up and was ready to accept that he would never get a good night's sleep again. Then one day about 2 weeks ago we woke up and realized that he had slept all night. We didn't do a thing; James did it on his own. Since then, he has only gotten up in the middle of the night once. Hopefully this will continue for the next seventeen or so years.

This week James and Daddy tried out Gymboree and the Little Gym. Both have kind of the same activities, but we liked the Little Gym better. We did more organized activities together there; the Gymboree was kind of a free-for-all. James seemed to like the kids and parents better at the Little Gym, too - most of the parents at the Gymboree were more interested in socializing with each other than with playing with their kids. At the Little Gym, we learned how to do a somersault (James did the somersault and Daddy helped him flip), played with a parachute, walked on a balance beam, and worked on sign language ("up," "down," and "bear [like the animal] "). It was a lot of fun for James and Daddy. We're going to talk to Meme about signing up for a regular class.

Along with his gymnastic activities, James also likes to dance when he hears music on TV. This is one of his favorites, a song from the Disney show "Imagination Movers." If you listen to the song, you can hear that he is going along perfectly with the words:

Since he can now understand and respond to things on TV, we are trying to keep the TV time down, and we are watching what we watch more. Of course James needs to watch football, and we usually watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, but we turn the TV off more and read several books a day (or one book several times, usually). In the morning, though, we still watch some kids' shows like the one above, or Sesame Street. Hopefully this will not turn James into a serial killer.

Another activity James has recently picked up is drawing. Scribbling, actually. We got him some crayons and markers for Christmas, and he is now an excellent scribbler. He even stays on the paper most of the time. The first few times we tried drawing, he put the crayons and markers right in his mouth. After he got tired of the taste, though, he started using them the way they were intended. We'll try to publish some of his works here soon.

Christmas!

Sorry we haven't updated the blog in a while. We didn't have any time during the Christmas travel marathon, and then when we got back the computer broke. Well, you know what they say: sometimes you're the windshield; sometimes you're the bug.

Over the Christmas break, we drove several hundred thousand miles to visit relatives. James didn't complain too much about the long hours in the car (less than Daddy did, anyway), but he did require Grandma's Iphone to keep him occupied much of the time. There was a lot of snow in Virginia when we got there, and we took James out to play in it a few times. He was not sure about the snow at first, but he eventually got where he enjoyed it. We found a James-sized sled, complete with a seatbelt, and here we see him going for a ride:

Okay, for some reason the video was pushed to the bottom of the page. Please scroll down. Stupid Apple computers.

On Christmas Eve, we went to the Lutheran Church that Great-Grandpa Lundberg attends. James was well-behaved, though occasionally squirmy. He also chose an inopportune time to practice saying, 'uh-oh', the new word he had recently learned. The preacher was leading one of those group prayers, saying something about judging the living and the dead, when James chimed in with an 'uh-oh'. It was the funniest thing to happen in a Lutheran church in several hundred years.

During the opening of the presents, James was far more excited about the laundry basket on the floor than he was about any of his many gifts. He did play with some of the gifts briefly, but he kept trying to climb into the basket. Apparently we should have shopped for James at Bed Bath & Beyond instead of Babies-R-Us. He is enjoying his gifts now, however. Since he has so many to choose from, we have only gotten out some of them; we can rotate in the rest until his birthday.

James is talking almost constantly now, although Mommy and Daddy aren't always clever enough to know what he's trying to say. From the expression he has when he talks to us, it is apparent that he knows exactly what he's saying. And he has added some English words to his vocabulary as well: the aforementioned uh-oh, bye-bye (complete with the wave), up (meaning 'pick me up'), bus, and bucket. He will also sometimes repeat a word right after Mommy or Daddy say it. We'll have to be careful with that.

Meme had the great idea of getting James into a class where he can practice his jumping and climbing in a more organized setting than the living room, something like The Little Gym. We are looking into our options here in Winder, and we hope to start one soon.

Thanks to everyone who sent us Christmas cards; hopefully our Christmas cards got to everybody. We hope you all had a good Christmas, and that the new year will bring you all blessings.