Rising to the occasion

We have asked a lot of Nicholas in the past couple days--putting him in numerous situations that required a lot of patience and good behavior. Between dinner out Friday evening, shopping for suits for both me and Joe on Saturday morning, and church last night as a family, it has not been a baby-centered couple of days.

But he has been quite the trouper. Not perfect by any means (he melted down before the end of each of the first two activities), but tolerable. And, possibly most importantly, he let us accomplish what we needed to get done. He even made it all the way through mass without having to go up to the cry room. We had to do a little pacing in the back towards the end and I bought us the last few minutes by letting him walk around the back, but he made it most of the way through occupied by looking around and chewing on his board books.

He also rose to the occasion when it came to dinner last night, as Joe mentioned in his last post. After two less than successful attempts and a downright refusal to eat last night, I was mentally composing a post asking for suggestions on how to get him to eat rice cereal. He loved the idea of eating, but wanted nothing to do with the cereal. But on our second try last night, right as we were about to give up, we decided to let him try to help and it was like magic. Suddenly he couldn't get enough, even on spoonfuls when Joe did it for him instead of having him help. Remind me in the future when we're having trouble getting him to cooperate that we need to empower him to do it. It is something I mentally know from classes and training for working with older kids (although I never expected it to apply to a 5-month old), but I tend to forget it in practice.