Many Funny Faces

Chris gave me the most wonderful Mother's Day. I would list everything he did, but it would come off like I was bragging, which I don't want to do. Suffice it to say, he treated me like a queen! Thanks, hon!

While at the LLL conference, we shopped at a shoe vendor and discussed with her transitional and hard-soled shoes. We did not end up buying John shoes, but the saleswoman gave us a good tip. She said that when transitioning her children, she leaves the new shoes out like they are toys, thus prompting the toddler to explore on his own. I recently bought John some semi-hard soled shoes with mesh uppers--sort of like beach or boat shoes. We've left them in the living room and John has asked us to put on one shoe, and eventually both shoes, over and over and over again, like it was a game. At first he'd ask one of us to put on a shoe, then he'd fuss, so we'd take it off, but he'd ask for it again two seconds later. We played the game and within a week or so, John wore both shoes and walked across the living room without crying for the first time. The saleswoman said it can be normal for the transition to hard soles to take some months (which I hadn't realized), so I guess our slow-to-adapt little boy is just taking his time, but making great progress. Here are the shoes:
John likes to play on the enclosed balcony, close the door, then make funny squishy faces at us from the outside.
Gggrrrrr!
I've got to make an effort to get John out of the house, especially since each floor of the apartment is relatively small: John gets bored. Today I took him to a local park which offers a playground. The enclosed play area has about four play structures, the simplest one for 2-5-year-olds. John proved a bit too young for the adventure as he wanted to bumble around among the big kids. A 4-year-old doing nothing wrong almost fell on top of him because my toddler was where he shouldn't have been. The playground offered too many opportunities for me to have to tell John "no," so I felt relieved that he didn't have a melt-down. He was truly fascinated by watching the bigger kids.

John does not like to swing, whether on a bench swing next to his dad, in an enclosed baby swing, or on a big swing on Mama's lap. The one thing he liked to do with the swing was bang the post and peer at me from the left and right of it (like he was hiding behind a tree).

Here is John making a funny face at me as he popped up yet again from his secret hiding spot:
John was taken by the purple dinosaur, which he claimed was a horse ("neigh!").