Caleb - 21 months old (April '12):
Caleb's happy dance. I LOVE this. I don't know how it started, but it cracks us up every time he does it. He bounces up and down while swinging his left arm back and forth....
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Caleb's favorite nursery rhyme right now is 'Its raining, its pouring' - he asks for it calling it 'man' in the book of nursery rhymes. We usually have to say it a half dozen times before he lets us move on.
Caleb loves, and has loved for quite some time, playing 'chase'... around the lap of our living room and kitchen, outside on the grass, or around the dining room table at Nonni's house. He gets so excited he screams.
One of the things he likes playing with right now is a food truck that we refer to as the 'taco truck' - its funny, it is actually a matchbox car sized food truck that says Almond Joy on the outside, complete with the sunroofs/ventilation lift things and windows for ordering on one side of it. When we drive around town Caleb loves to look for and point out every truck, tractor, motorhome, and tow truck that he sees, so when he first noticed the taco trucks, I just said 'yes, there is a truck, that is a taco truck,' and he has been pointing them out around town every since. So when he happened to get this Almond Joy one in a package of vehicles it was perfect! One day we even tried to recreate it out of blocks... Have to use your imagination a bit...
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| *Note the smile, finally captured on camera! Haha... |
4/19/12: Caleb and mommy ate curried butternut squash and veggies for dinner. Caleb looked at me after eating a few bites and said 'spicy'. I told him we could add more yogurt on top to make it less spicy. He kept eating and then when he would come across a bite that wasn't doused in yogurt he said 'too spicy', I would give him some water and redirect his fork, and he would continue until the next spicy bite. Too cute. I didn't even think he knew what spicy was!
Favorite movie: Ratatouille (he calls it 'tia'). We went through about a month of watching it once a day...
Caleb - 22 months old (May '12):
A handful of you have been the happy recipients of a "love beep". This started when we were leaving Papa Jack and Nana Dee's house recently, and I beeped the horn three times to represent "I-love-you". This is something I have done when leaving my grandparents' house probably since I was in high school, so I explained to Caleb what the three beeps meant, and he started calling it a "love beep". He loves when we do it, and asks for it when we drive away from just about anyone now, friends or family. You may be next! :)
Current top activities:
"Throw bed!" (tossing him onto our bed over and over and over) and "Throw high!" (Jimmy 'throws' Caleb up in the air above his head, lowers Caleb down to the ground, makes him run to the neighbors light post and back, and then they do it again. Good thinking daddy! Gotta get that extra energy out with a little running!)
"Color chalk", aka Sidewalk Chalk. So far they are mostly single lines that Caleb draws with his chalk, though he has just started to do small groupings of lines, but mostly it ends up all over his face, clothes, and random places like the outside of the garage door, the tree trunk, and the brick on the front of the house. He doesn't really understand that you can't touch it after drawing the color or it will come off onto you...
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| Daddy's helper |
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An early morning 'bath' in the sprinklers. He was shivering so much, but like most kids, didn't want to dry off...
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| Caleb loves loving on Landon! |
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| Mommy and Caleb on a bike ride to meet Daddy and Landon for a picnic at the park |
New addition to the movie list this month: Mary Poppins
Caleb is starting to pay attention to numbers and letters, and wants to try and count things the way we point out and count to him. When I ask him how many there are of something, or to count something, he says "one, two, one, two, one, two..." as he points to (more than just two) items.
Caleb's is at the stage, with both languages, where his is like a little parrot repeating every sentence (well, simple versions of our sentences) out of our mouths. I have really been trying to be better about speaking Spanish to him more often, and he is repeating almost all of the Spanish words back to me, too. I love it that he doesn't have any hesitation at trying to pronounce big words. I suppose part of that is that he doesn't understand yet that he is trying to say words in a second language. This morning he randomly starting saying 'Jesus' (Spanish pronunciation), followed by 'a-choo!' and 'bless you', because this is one of the things I have told him that we say when someone sneezes. I have also bought a few books for him in Spanish recently, and he started picking up on the vocabulary of it immediately Ex: Diez en la Cama he calls 'diez cama' - a book about ten teddy bears in a bed, and Mis Primeras Mil Palabras, My first thousand words, he calls 'Mil palatas'... sounds pretty similar when he says it).
I'm a proud mama :)
