What a cutie!

A cute picture of Joan, taken this morning, just for fun. She's sitting in her stroller, and almost supporting her own weight. She's getting strong now - not as strong as John was at this age, but still strong. It must take a lot of muscle to hold up such a big little body!

She's really fun now, because she can control her hands really well. She grabs at everything. she loves to touch John's hair, but he's not so thrilled when she does. Her increasing mobility has sparked some sibling rivalries. She grabs his toys and books. He's good at sharing though, and he'll "read" her his books. He sat beside her and "read" her Goodnight Moon the other day. It was so cute! He's memorized it, so it looks like he's reading to her, even though he's not, entirely. But now and then, he won't share. So far, when that happens, I've been taking the toy away entirely. That sure gets him sharing in a hurry! I'm sure it will get more complicated as we go, though. But so far, John's a great big brother, and when I see him doing something nice for her, I make a point of slathering on the praise.

It's really interesting watching John develop. He's going through a bit of a phobia stage these days. He's been afraid of the dark for a long time, but now he has the words to articulate it. He'll actually stop before entering a dark room and says "I scared."

We've known about his fear of deep water for a while now, too. But now that he has more words, he was able to say why - he WANTS to swim with dad, but he's scared because he doesn't know how to swim, and he's afraid crabs will bite off his toes. I would never have guessed the crab part in a million years.

The other day, he walked in on me cooking sausages - one of his favourite foods - and he flipped out on me. Once I got him calmed down, he told me that sausages are people's fingers. After a quick explanation of how sausages are made, he happily ate three of them. I'm going to assume that one was from a bad dream of some sort.

It must suck to know enough about the world to finally put two and two together, but to understand it all so little that two plus two equals 15. At least we've had success in nipping some fears in the bud. I'm trying to work on spiders. I can see a phodbia brewing over those, so whenever we see one, we watch it together, and we tell him that spiders are our friends, because they eat bugs that want to eat our food. We've worked on monsters, too. Mike made the mistake one day of telling John that a monster lives in our house, and lives on the main floor while we sleep, in an attempt to keep him in his bed at night. Well, it kept him in his bed alright. He believed it completely, to the point where he said he'd SEEN the monster, and was scared. After the third monster sighting, we decided we needed to do something, so we morphed it into a creature who protects us from bad things while we sleep. I think we told him it spends its nights playing with the cats and eating ice cream. There have been no monster sightings since. (Though, I signed out Where the Wild Things Are from the library for him, and even though he keeps asking for it, he always hides behind me just before we get to the monster part.) Sure have to be careful what you say around little kids! Mike very rightly chastized me today for pointing out someone's race. Our mechanic is right across the street, and is a big black Jamaican guy. John had happened to see him move our car from the street into his garage to repair the flat tire, and had come to us upset, because he thought it had been stolen. I asked him if a big black man had taken it, and he said yes. My bad - we're trying not to point out differences in race, with the hopes of keeping him "colour blind". Doubt it will work, but it's worth a shot.

Anyway, I'd better get going.