Moving, Moving, Moving

I forgot already: What do you do with a crawler??

Luckily, Nick still likes his rainforest play mat and will lie there for a while and play without moving too far away. But almost total freedom of movement is coming soon!

Xander has been (almost) a little angel today. It's what happens when I get strict with him. Too many choices makes Xander a cranky boy.

One activity we can all do together that is a delight at this time is read My Big Animal Book. I already mentioned this, but Xander likes to do the animal noises for each picture and Nick cranks his head around to look and see if those are really the sounds he hears coming out of Mommy's or Xander's mouths. He loves it. (Just like the books say he will at this age.)

Nick still turned up his nose a little at oatmeal and prunes this morning but he ate peas like a pro for lunch. Hurray! It was his first time with them. Poor baby has a bad diaper rash from diarrhea which came from the antibiotic which was given because of his ear infection which was a result of the cold he caught. I don't like that chain of events! Xander had a big ol' turkey sandwich with lettuce for lunch. He doesn't realize it yet, but for snack he will be having the green beans he didn't eat with lunch.

He and I started back up with learning activities yesterday. We skipped them for a while due to Thanksgiving festivities and illness. We're on "H" week still. He gets so excited when we sing "If You're Happy and You Know It." It's a delight to watch his face while we sing and do the motions. Today I did some little kid exercises with him that I found on a blog and he had great fun with that. We'll have to do that again. Mommy got really tired and hungry afterward, but Xander didn't! We did things like roll-backs, hopping, jumping jacks, stork stands, and crabwalking. I've been borrowing kid exercise videos from the library so Xander could get out more energy since he seems to sit around and play when he goes outside. He would just sit on the couch and watch them. Even when I did the exercises, he just watched and said he couldn't do them. I didn't realize until weeks later that he remembers the exercises. Today he said, "I'm doing triceps," and worked his arms up and back. He remembers some of the muscle group names, too. He did the downward-facing dog from YogaKids yesterday. So all that couch time was not wasted time.