Busy Playing

That is a good way to describe John's average day, or at least a large percentage of his day. He plays a lot, but he does it with purpose. He focuses all his attention on doing his chosen activity, be it coloring, swinging, building with legos, or doing a puzzle.

It used to be that when John was very quiet, he was getting into some mischief; sometimes that is still the case, but often, he is now quiet because he is focusing on finishing one of his puzzles. When he finishes his puzzle, he immediately dumps it out and starts over. Unfortunately, he usually decides he is tired of doing puzzles at a point when all the pieces are out of the puzzle frame, instead of in it:

Here is John on Valentine's Day, eating heart-shaped pancakes. Also, this is a pre-haircut photo:


This is John on our front porch lining up his cars. This is generally the precursor to him methodically pushing all the cars off the edge of the short wall and into the plants beneath the wall; in fact, that is what he did right after I took this photo. Also, you can see here that he got his hair cut:

Although he is so busy with things to play with, John does manage to find a little time to help me out around the house. One of his favorite activities to do (I think it makes him proud that he is helping) is to prepare budu for cooking. Budu is a local green; you basically have to tear the leaves off the stems before cooking the leaves. John will sit with me for a long time, carefully pulling each leaf off the stem. However, he invariably gets bored after a while and decides to start being funny, at which point he starts throwing the leaves into the trash and the tough stems into the bowl of leaves. So then I send him off to go play again.