A great day for Mom and kids

In addition to the fun adventures pictured below, other events of note
include Delenn's becoming more boisterous and vocal when deciding she's
had enough fun time in a particular activity and is ready to move on to
something else. She's also becoming quite adept at forcefully reaching
out to grab anything that has gotten her attention. Beware if you hold
her, because the sudden lurch for things like your glass or plate of
food can catch you by surprise! Speaking of food and drink, Logan made
us laugh at dinner tonight by non-chalantly eating his cooked carrot
with a fork. What's so interesting about eating a carrot with a fork
you might ask? Well, in this case the fork was really a toy triceratops
that the boy smuggled onto the dinner table unbeknownst to his parents.
At about the same time both Mom and Dad happened to notice the kid using
the triceratops horns to skewer and chow down his morsels. Not the most
clean and sterile method of eating, but definitely creative! In
addition to that, Logan did a great job of paying attention during
'quiet' reading time today. After his nap (which he's been good at
taking for the past few days), Logan had something to eat and was
extremely good for the rest of the afternoon. Mom theorizes and will
test the fact that Logan may need food right after waking up from a nap
or he's a complete grouch and pain-in-the-butt... lately he's been an
afternoon terror and we now surmise it might be because we're holding
him off from eating until our 5:30 PM dinnertime.
Of other interests to note, Mom is reading a book called "Magic Trees of
the Mind". It's a book about the development of the brain. For
example, it explains that by the age of 6-8 months the frontal and rear
lobes are burning glucose and oxygen at a furious pace (an explosion of
synaptic connections) --which coincides with stranger anxiety and with
the baby's ability to engage parents, siblings, etc in an increasingly
sophisticated way. "Metabolic rates keep rising until the energy use in
a 2-year old is equal to an adults. Then THE LEVELS KEEP RISING until,
by age THREE, the child's brain is TWICE as active as an adult's." In
other words, there is a lengthy period of over-connectedness (of
synapses) in the brain. Then as the individual begins to become their
own person, the unused and unnecessary neural circuits die away. The
book goes on to explain that this over active brain corresponds with the
behavior of children and they experience the (highly distractable)
TERRIBLE TWOS essentially because they don't have control while they are
in this overconnected state. (People with schizophrenia have a similar
problem in that too many synapses are connected.) So, a decline in
connectivity does not indicate that one's learning ability is in decline
(remember when your biology teacher scared you with the statistics about
how many hundreds of thousands of brain cells are dying all the time?!),
but rather skills (such as language, physical coordination, etc.) emerge
as the overconnectedness of the brain is whittled down and shaped.
Anyway, all this makes us feel better that the temper tantrums are a
sign that the brain is doing what it should be doing (growing, maturing)
and Logan's behavior is NOT a reflection of our parenting skills (or
lack thereof). However, we're not sure now if we should push his
interests in certain directions so that the neural pathways for say
"golfing" remain and then lead him to be the next Tiger Woods and
relieve his poor parents from having to work the rest of their lives
(HA! :-) But perhaps golf is a bad example.