shopping better than swimming?

This afternoon when Corbin woke up from his nap, we went to the pool. Unfortunately, they no longer have the outdoor pool open. There's no notice of this on their website or their street signs, but in small print on the front door is a sign saying that they don't have enough staff except for Thursdays and Fridays after 4:00. I was pretty unhappy with them, and Corbin was pretty confused. There was no one else at all in the indoor pool, so I felt strange having the only lifeguard's sole attention. Corbin never really got into it, frequently getting out of the pool to look out the windows. We "swam" for about 45 minutes before another little girl came in and requested that the water fountains be turned on. Corbin had put up with that for about five minutes after we arrived before we had them turn it off. For whatever reason, all the water pouring and noise was too scary for him. He enjoyed watching it, but from a safe distance outside the pool.

So we went home and quickly changed shoes. Then we headed to Old Navy for "shopping." Corbin sounded unusally excited about going shopping, but I wasn't going to remind him how much he normally hates it. They have their Halloween costumes on their website now, but not in the store, we found. I was going to check out their monkey costume, but we'll have to go back in a few weeks. Corbin was extremely well-behaved, eating dried apple pieces out of a cup (without spilling any!) and even letting me try shoes on him.

Then we went to Barnes and Noble to play with the train set and read books. Corbin has a tendency to pull books off the shelf that he already has, so it's a challenge to get him to look at something new. We found a firetruck book with a steering wheel on the front that he played with for a long time. I bought him a magnets book to play with during church. I hope it's time-consuming. We also got a "quiet busy book" off e-bay earlier this week, since they were all $30 new. I hope he's content with the zipper, shape matching, etc, since there are more difficult pages like shoe-tying and buttoning that will be sure to frustrate him. Corbin tends to yell when he's frustrated, which won't go over well in church.

All on his own today, Corbin decided to sort his letter magnets by colors in a line (the right line is blue). It was pretty astonishing, although it shouldn't have surprised me. He's certainly thinking that letters are old hat by now!

Today we opened a puzzle I've been saving in his closet, that has real pieces to put together with each other, though it's still wood. I was surprised at how well he did. Not that he was very good at it, but neither was he completely confused by it. The corner pieces were pretty clear to him, even if the rest were jumbled a little. :-)