The sleepless wonder

Will and I are in the process of working on our daily routine. One thing that is kind of nice is that Will seems to have shifted from waking up at 6:15 to waking up at around 6:45, which we can sometimes stretch until close to 7:00 if we ignore his initial whimpers. So we're not complaining about that. But he doesn't seem interested at all in napping anymore, at least in his crib. This isn't too surprising because Will has never been particularly into napping in his crib, but last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday afternoons he took a nice, long nap in his crib, leaving me with lots of time to do things and hang out and relax and I got spoiled. But in the last week that has not happened again, and it's a little bit frustrating. He'll fall asleep in my arms and the second I put him in his crib he starts screaming. I usually let him scream it out for twenty or thirty minutes, and most of the time he falls asleep eventually, but not for more than a half hour or maybe forty minutes. And then he wakes up and screams again. I usually let him do this for another ten minutes before I conclude that he's definitely not falling back asleep, and then I get him and he cries even louder for a while just to let me know how much I've hurt his feelings. And then we cuddle and eat a banana and he's happy again. But other than not really napping, it turns out that Will's a reasonably fun guy to be with. Sometimes he's pretty clingy and he only wants me to carry him, and sometimes he wants to walk with me holding his hand, but sometimes he's happy to play in his playroom (like above) while I do things like start to get dinner ready.

Sometimes we go to the playground, where Will mostly plays with wood chips. He's very interested in other little kids, and he'll often go up to them and try to play with them, but it seems like he's an unusually social little guy because for the most part the other kids seem to turn around, melt into their mother's legs, and pray that when they open their eyes the smiling one year old will be gone. This has created some awkward moments for me, because although I was a shy kid, that was a long time ago and Will is the only person his age that I regularly interact with and he is not at all shy, so I don't really know how to handle the situation. Usually I just pick him up and we go back to playing with the wood chips. But I think I've started to understand at least part of what is going on. We went to a playgroup today with a few kids around 17 months old, and one in particular acted very threatened by Will. He cried and freaked out any time Will approached him. His mom explained that he was afraid that Will was going to take the toys he was playing with. One of the moms at the playground yesterday said something similar about her daughter, so now I wonder if in a few months we might reach the age where Will starts caring if other kids take his stuff. But maybe not, it might be more of a personality thing. In any case, today was fun and it was nice that Will got to interact with some other kids close to his age and play with lots of toys that were totally new to him.