Sliding Down Head First

Woo Hoo! It has been a busy weekend. We started by hosting a dinner party for 10 (I cooked Penne alla Vodka from Epicurious) on Friday night and the weekend kept going at full tilt until just this second. Between daily walks to the park, runs along the water, giving a halibut en papillote (my favorite thing to cook when fish is fresh) demonstration at dinner Saturday night with friends, and a very (yawn) early morning drive to Seattle today to watch a dear friend graduate from her Masters Program in Organizational Systems Renewal, it doesn’t feel like there was much of a traditional, restful weekend in there. But, even if there wasn’t a lot of downtime, there was a lot of fun and joy. This blog post has three videos so if you’re an email subscriber, you’ll need to click through to the blog to see the videos.

Jamisen is a new devotee of the Bellingham Parks System. Thank you Bellingham taxpayers for such lovely, lovely family places to be. He learned today how to go down the slide, by himself. Of course, he is happier going head first. Since he can’t keep us his core strength enough to go down on his little tooshie without falling back and hitting his head on the slide, I’m okay with this new daredevil tendency.

Jamisen is starting to walk like a little champ! Look at him, walking with one hand in Daddy’s and the other hand carrying a big stick. His Grandpa coined this photo, “Crawl softly, carry a bit stick.” Ha!

Jamisen is displaying a beautifully sweet tendency to want to share with other children. He just gives and gives (generally wood chips and pine cones) and when bullies steal his pine cones, he looks up at me, with a puzzled expression on his face and just goes merrily about finding new things to play with. It is charming.

Mealtimes are AWESOME now that Jamisen happily eats solids and actually prefers them. We just cut up a bunch of healthy food, toss it on his tray and let him control his intake. We still have to spoon feed him some things (vegetables generally) but for the most part, 2/3rds of his meal is small bites of whatever we’re eating.

Here is a video of Mr. Jamisen chowing down on (get this!!!) halibut. HALIBUT!

My favorite part of the video is when he’s out of halibut, so he looks under the bowl to find more.

He loves our almost daily walks and points out all the birds we see on the walk. He says “buh, buh!” and points. One of his favorite activities in the house is standing up on the windowsills (with us behind him, supporting him) and watching for birds. He takes after his Grandma Faiola with the early love of birdwatching.

This is my new favorite video. We have a giant ladder in our house that goes up to our wall library (side note: it came with the house and it was definitely a major selling point for us). Jamisen loves to use the ladder to practice his walking skills. All of his skills are just starting to develop. He’s communicating (pointing, doing the ‘all done’ sign language sign periodically, clapping for ‘yes’), starting to walk and showcasing a gentle yet determined spirit. We’ve taken all the great advice from this blog post to heart and we’ve been for the most part, ignoring outbursts, or explaining ahead of time what we’ll be doing (“In a minute, we’re going to go to the bedroom and change your pants so we can go to the park!”) and we’re already noticing a nice change. Is it him growing up? Is it us and the new tactics? We’ll never know but so far, outbursts are dramatically cut down around here and we’re lovin’ it!