Coins!

Give the little guy a container of change and a cheap plastic piggy bank that they were handing out for free at the grocery store and you get this:


Enough free time to actually get some holiday baking done! AJ was fascinated this weekend by putting coins into the free piggy bank he received at the grocery store, so I sat him down on the kitchen floor with a bucket of Joe's change and let AJ drop in quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies to his hearts content, which actually gave me a good 45 minutes to get in some holiday baking. As excited as I am about the upcoming arrival of the new baby, I have to admit that I am a little wistful about leaving behind the new phase that AJ is in where he can amuse himself for short periods of time to return to the land of much more time-intensive newborns. In retrospect, I think that AJ was particularly time-intensive as a baby because he never napped for more than 20 minutes until he was somewhere around at least 10 months old. I have a good friend whose first baby was similar to AJ in his sleep patterns and whose second baby is now 4 months old and has always been much easier to handle than her first. She said it is like a different world. I am hoping that we will be similarly blessed with a laid-back second child.