Of Bookshelves and Dog Water - June 30, 2009

Strange title for a blog post, right? Those two items happen to be Clark's favorite targets with his newfound mobility. Within the last week he has pretty much completely mastered the art of crawling on his hands and knees (as opposed to the belly scooting he was doing before) and it has really increased his speed. His obsession with the bookshelves and dog bowls have provided us with our first "opportunity" to teach him the concept of No along with some redirection, which was met with some tantrums at first, but less so as we've repeated the exercise.

We had a nice little weekend here in Indianapolis. We had a baby shower / brunch for our friends Justin and Lis with our bible study group Saturday morning, then Shawn and Lisa, two of our other friends from that group came over to babysit Clark in the afternoon. That afforded Katie and me the opportunity to go on a date for what felt like the first time in months, so we had a nice lunch at a waterside restaurant and then walked around a shopping center for a while just enjoying the free time. Shawn and Lisa hung around for dinner and taught us a game called Dominion, which was a lot of fun.

Sunday was pretty lazy. Katie and I traded Clark-watching duties and sleep times in the morning (I took 6-8:30 while she slept, then she took 8:30-11 while I slept). We went on several walks throughout the day and ended up just enjoying the beautiful weather out on the deck as the sun set.

Last night when I got home, Clark had apparently decided that he would not allow his plastic shape blocks to remain in their storage bucket, nor his colored donut rings to remain stacked on their post. This led to a game that lasted nearly an hour (off and on) where I would immediately replace the blocks or donut rings as he emptied the bucket or destroyed the stack, and he would simply keep trying to empty the bucket or take all the rings off the post. He was very workman-like in his approach, and it was very interesting to watch him try to accomplish this goal that he had apparently set. Even more impressive to me was the fact that he never got mad at me for constantly undoing all his work - he just ignored it and kept about his business! It's really fun to watch these kinds of behaviors develop in him.