Out Wit. Out Play. Out Last

Out Wit

JJ and Alexis are continually showing us how smart they are. They have been playing with their toys with much greater fascination and, apparently, skill lately. One of their favorites is a musical toy with buttons on primary-colored handles. When you press a button, it names the color (red, yellow, blue) then proceeds to play appropriately upbeat tunes. JJ was playing with it the other day and I hear the color "purple" followed by purple lights and purpley-colored music. I run over, figuring he pressed both the blue and the red handles simultaneously. I couldn't get it to repeat the purple function. Perplexed, I hand the toy back to JJ and a few seconds later I hear "purple" again. I spent a good half an hour trying to figure out how he did it. (note: Mike couldn't figure it out either. ) This is probably the first in a long series of events that will continue to indicate that infants are smarter than we are.

Alexis has invented her own game. It's called fake-coughing. She can play it while eating, bathing or during a screaming-session. The goal, apparently, is to get you to come running to see if something is the matter. The coughs are then interrupted with smiles, as if to say, "ha ha... gotcha."  Clever girl--but we've caught on.

Out Play

As mentioned, they have been playing more and more with just about everything lately. But I am pleased to report that they still get puckered-out within 2 hours of playing or simply being awake. So to date at least, we (parents) have the edge. The day will soon come I'm sure when we won't be able to keep up--I can envision the time where we'll put them in their play room and fall asleep blocking the door.

Out Last

We have yet to do any serious "sleep training" [read: CIO].  However, JJ has recently developed the unfortunate habit of rolling in one-direction only. This leads to bouts of frustration during his naps and at very inopportune times after midnight. Multiple times, we have tried to let him cry, but after only a few minutes we (usually Mike) caves in and goes to rescue him from the side of his crib. He can definitely cry until we can't take it anymore.  Hopefully, we'll develop stronger backbones soon. Or maybe JJ will finally learn to roll in both directions. He's started to show signs of "rocking" though, so I predict he'll be crawling before he masters rolling. While Alexis isn't rolling regularly in either direction, she's incredibly content on her back and happily spends 12+ hours in her crib at night (not always asleep--but independent nonetheless).

We've uploaded more pics and videos at dropshots, have fun looking.