not at his best

The past two days with Corbin have been very, very long. It started Thursday night after he'd gone to sleep. He kept waking up to cry for short periods of time. Finally I went in to check on him, determined nothing was wrong, and convinced him to go back to sleep. This happened a couple more times before I finally left him to cry. Sad, but he stayed asleep. Then Friday morning he was whining a lot, being extremely defiant, and then crying stubbornly for long periods of time. For example, when I tried to give him a choice of fruit for lunch, he wouldn't pick one. So I put the oranges in a bowl, and he cried for at least ten minutes in protest after being physically wrestled into his highchair. But once he had to admit that nothing was going to change, he happily ate them all. It sure is tiring to deal with that kind of thing over and over and over. So that afternoon we went to the Grapevine mall, which doesn't have a play area, but there were lots of other things to keep his attention. The new Children's Place store has a big kids' area, we watched the carousel, and checked out the baby turtles/hampsters for sale. One of the gals at their Kiddie Kandids came out of her store to ask us for a free 8x10, so we tried to get a good shot. Corbin wasn't fooled, though. He was nice about it, but just wanted "down" from the platform. It's been months since I took him, so I have no idea how he's remembered that photography is scary. She tried to get him to smile for probably 10 minutes before we gave up. Oh well. We had a good dinner at Macaroni Grill with Daddy.

Today we watched Daddy mow the lawn, did Gymboree, and went to the pool after naptime. It was threatening rain, so the clouds made it almost chilly. He wasn't quite excited about swimming, probably because we haven't been in a few weeks. But it wasn't too crowded, and we stayed for about an hour and a half. He got a little more independent than he has in the past, jumping off the ledge (about 6") into the water on his own. He also discovered that he could jump off the second step of the play tower over the first step and onto the floor. I was impressed that he could jump so far, even with a little assistance from Mommy. There were three other little kids there just a couple months older than Corbin, and he paid a lot of attention to them, copying a lot of what they were doing. It's good to see him developing more social awareness. After we left, we went to the playground for a while, where Corbin went up and down all the different steps easily. He didn't really want on the swings, for whatever reason. That was a surprise.

So even though he's been quite a brat lately, we're managing to be consistent about not responding to such behavior. I don't know if it's a reaction to his increased hours in daycare, some sort of expression of whatever's causing his runny nose, or just a normal part of being almost 22 months old. Hopefully he can adjust to sharing Mommy's at-home time with all the books she now has to read. :-)