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.