It got up to almost eighty here yesterday.  I was really geeked about putting shorts on Carter and letting him walk around barefoot.  I sat him in front of the fireplace in our living room and giggled at him.  He giggled back at me for about ten minutes.  So I considered it a fourteen month mini-photo shoot. 

It was a glorious twelve hours of spring.  But then I woke up and the thermometer read forty-one.  Back to long sleeves and pants.  Back to turning on the heat.  Back to hermit-ing ourselves inside.  At least the sky is blue today and the sun is out.  So my springtime mood isn’t completely dampered.  

On another note, our struggles with getting Brayden to play more independently continue daily.  James came up with an idea to put a bunch of activity ideas in a bowl and letting him choose one (at random) if he tells us that he has nothing to do.  So today I made some laminated cards and put them in a bowl.  Brayden found this entrancing, and for about an hour and a half, he picked cards out of the bowl and played whatever it said to do.  

I made up some rules along the way.  

-When you pick a card, you are not allowed to say, I don’t want to do that.  

-You have to do the activity until the timer goes off.  I set the timer somewhere between ten and twenty minutes depending on the activity (playing with trains was twenty, coloring was ten, playing on the computer was fifteen, etc).  

-We have to completely clean up the previous activity before picking a new card

My husband is sometimes full of ingenious ideas. Good work, James!