Play Nice

I have mentioned before how my boys are becoming fast friends. Last night Justin and I were discussing Tyler and his quirks and how he doesn't seem to do well in social situations (he doesn't talk to anyone unless he know them very well, he doesn't really interact with other kids at church, etc). I told Justin I didn't want him to be the loaner kid in school that doesn't have any friends and is depressed. Justin simply says "he already has one". How true.

Yesterday Carter decided to dump all the puzzles out. Tyler stopped what he was doing to go do the puzzles. We have about 10 puzzles or so and the pieces were all intermingled. Carter would hand Tyler a puzzle piece and Tyler would say "Thank you Carter". If it wasn't a piece of the puzzle he was currently doing Tyler would say "nope" and put in in its own pile for later.

It warmed my heart to see this. 1., because Tyler was using such great manners. For every single piece he would say "thank you Carter" even if it wasn't the piece he needed. 2., because they were playing so nice together. They were sharing and solving a problem together. I don't think much else would have made that 10 minutes any better.

Climb On!

Carter is such a climber. He climbs on to anything and everything that he can. But he is also a very cautious climber. He takes his time and if he thinks he will fall he will totally get off the object he is trying to climb and start all over again. Once he is up he is so proud of himself. I took the boys to the mall play area today and Carter was climbing on everything like a pro. He was using his bare feet to grip on the foamy surface and was scaling some things better than Tyler (who only uses his arm strength). Hopefully he will continue to be cautious!

Carter is also in the container phase. You know the one where they like to put things into a container and them dump it right back out just to fill it up again? Carter will do this many times throughout the day. So because of this and Sarah's blog (a good friend of ours) I decided to try the shape sorter with him. Usually whenever I try to do the shape sorter Tyler comes in and "helps" (or does it all) for Carter. I make them take turns. One gets to do one shape then the other gets to do one shape. For some reason it seems that Tyler is always doing more shapes. So today I made Tyler wait until Carter got all the shapes in before he could have a turn. Well they shared very nicely taking turns and Carter did fantastic with the sorter! I am having a hard time just spending time with Carter. I usually can find time with just Tyler (he brings me books and sits in my lap, asks for a games, ect.), but Carter is in the stage where he is fine playing by himself, and most of the time prefers it. Basically what I am saying is that I need to find more activities like this just to do with Carter. I feel so guilty that I don't get the time to work with him on his animal sounds, body parts etc., that I got to do with Tyler. However I know the benefits of having each other outweighs any of that. And its obvious from how well he did the shape sorter that he is picking something up!