He's on the right track.

Jim is not a quiet person to live with. He yells, and he screams (both happily and un-); he chases the cats, and he throws anything that will fit in his hands. But occasionally, everything will just fall silent for a suspiciously long period of time. And when that happens, you can generally find him like so:


Jim's favorite place.



This has been building up off and on. The first time it happened, I was washing dishes and realized I hadn't heard Jim for about three minutes. Naturally, I was certain he was dead. So I went off looking for him in a panic, and there he was, sitting in the corner of his room on his own little chair reading one of his picture books. Freakin' adorable, yes? Lately, he's been more suggestible about it. "Hey Jim, you should go sit in your chair and read a book," I say, and he looks like a cartoon light bulb just went off over his head before he races back to get his book out.


As you can see, he's already learning the value of healthy skepticism.

Usually he needs to be alone in his room for this to work (if he sees one of us, he wants us to read to him instead), but yesterday I got the bright idea of bringing his chair out to the living room. We had the life-changing experience (seriously, life-changing - I'm not even exaggerating) of all three of us sitting and reading books quietly in the same room for about half an hour. It was amazing. I remember doing that with my family when I was a kid, and I'm so excited about being able to do that with Jim. We still spend plenty (pleeeeenty) of time reading to him, but his new interest in looking quietly at his own books while we read grown-up books is an extremely welcome development.


The silence truly is great, but if you're really lucky, he may even make animal noises while reading.