Ami Turns 29.... for the first time

Its kinda cool. I just had a birthday and now I will never age again. No.... I'll just have anniversaries of my 29th birthday. I think I can handle this. ;)

So I was fortunate to receive a replacement to my aged camera for my birthday from my very generous parents with the condition that they get lots and lots of pictures of the grandbaby on a regular basis. I will have you know that with in 24 hours of my receiving my gift they received this bunch of pics taken at a little shindig Bill and Jo threw for me at their house!

Be amazed - Caleb photos TWICE in less than a month. I know. I know. Try to contain your excitement. ;)

This here is Mr. Caleb investigating the side yard by the tennis court.

And I was checking out the Macro mode on my new camera by taking pictures of these TINY but GORGEOUS flowers growing up the wall in the side yard.

Mr. Caleb running around the tennis court! Camera also handles action shots nicely.

Caleb got interested in what Mom was doing and tried to scale the fence (with some help from Uncle Mark).

 Tell me thats not one of the cutest faces you've ever seen! You can see whats left of his black eye. Got his first big shiner this week. He was playing on the love seat and totally face planted on the hard back edge of the sofa. Poor Caleb was seriously unhappy until I gave him an ice pack to play with. It was supposed to go on his face but he decided playing with it was a much better option.

And me with my birthday cake:

 The cake was super tasty and very pretty.

Mr. Caleb was playin w/ Aunt Natalie's sun glasses. I think he looks like a cool dude myself...

 Uncle Mark provided a lot of entertainment by thoughtfully unplugging this phone so that Caleb could play with it all he wanted. He had a blast.

Caleb 19 Months

Well Mr. Caleb has done growed again! And a friend of mine was sweet enough to catch these pics of Caleb with her camera and even sweeter to let me copy them to my computer! So since it has been FAR, far too long since you guys got a glimpse of his cuteness here are some pics of Caleb from last month!

This first shot was taken the day after Christmas actually. He was walking around talking on the phone. He just loves that little Elmo phone. I felt like I was listening in on a conversation in a foreign language. I could only understand about every 5th word.

And here we are being silly at a restaurant up the road. We grabbed dessert with 2 friends of mine and Mr. Caleb was being cute while we were waiting for the food to arrive. 

Caleb was no content to flirt from the far side of the table. So since the table was still food free he got away with crawling across the thing to be cute. 

He's only slightly pleased with himself. lol

Caleb prefers the milk goatee to the milk mustache. 

Caleb 18 Month Check Up

Well Mr. Caleb had his 18 month check up with the doctor today! Our boy is now the same size as the average 3 year old!!! Oh My HECK! I gave birth to that!! 

The stats are: 27 lbs 14 oz, 37 inches tall, 19.5 inch head. Putting him off the charts for height, 80th percentile for weight and 95th percentile for head. The doc says that he looks fantastic and doesn't need to see him again until he turns 2! 

AND just to sweeten the deal we didn't have ANY shots this visit. We did do a TB test but that went really fast and Caleb calmed down amazingly well afterwards. 

I've decided Caleb does know what a stranger is after all because you should have seen the looks he was giving the doctor and nurses. He was all "Excuse you, this is my personal space! Hey! Hey! Stop with the touching! I said NO TOUCHY! I don't know you! MOM!!!!" He like JUMPED into my arms and then started trying to remove the doctors hands and push him away. lol. And the facial expressions were priceless. I think he must have learned a thing or two from his cousin Leah when we were in Texas last week. 

But we're home, a reward sippy has been had and he's now out for a nap! 

Caleb At the Park

So I took Caleb to the park today for the first time in recent months. The disgusting bake you alive Arizona heat does not lend itself to safely enjoying the outdoors with a wee widget. But its cooled down enough and I seriously needed to get out of the house so we went for it.

And at first Mr. Caleb was having NOTHING of it. He was kinda tired (I'm trying to wean him off the second nap because if he takes it he doesn't want to go to bed until like midnight and thats NOT okay), and so initially he did NOT want me to put him down. He did NOT want the swing.

I started to win him over by the two of us sitting and swinging for a bit in the tire swing and then Bre and I took turns going down the slide with him. And then he did another round in the baby swing and this time he enjoyed it (we put Bre at one end of the arc and me at the other so he had somebody cheering him on both ways).

And about then a bunch of other little kids showed up and he was just FASCINATED to watch them play. He would follow them around and just watch smiling. It was really cute. And then he started exploring the play ground and having a good time and played with a couple of toys.

But he finally settled in for a good long round of digging in the sand/gravel of the playground. He was just very intent. First he dug the hole, then he filled the hole. Next he decided to bury his leg. Then he started showing me all the little rocks and pieces of sticks and grass that he would find in the sand. And he did that until it was time to head home.

When I stood him up and brushed him off on the bench before we headed home he had a small PILE of dirt that came out the bottom of his romper. lol. He even had sand in his diaper! He got a bath tonight.

OH and he was so worn out he was rubbing his eyes and walking into the furniture at 9:30. :D :D

So I think it was a success and we definitely need to do it again soon and regularly. :)

Caleb 17 Months

Meet Mr. Insanely Adorable. In the last month Caleb has really been turning on the charm. I love it. He's figured out how to say the "Boo!" part of "Peekaboo!" and so now he's forever popping up from behind, around or over things and shouting "Boo!" with a big delighted smile.

He's a lot harder to photograph now actually because he knows what the camera is, and he wants it, and he's so fast now. I can get maybe one shot and then he's climbing up me like a tree trying to get the camera.

Caleb is also a serious technophile. There are few things that will delight him like getting his hands on the remote or one of the computers. Of course not getting the thing he wants now leads to some rather hysterical to watch foot stomping. It cracks me up. I'm sure thats not the reaction he's going for but more often than not when he's expressing his displeasure with me for not letting him have something and he either growls at me (no I have no idea where he would have gotten that from....) or starts stomping his feet I just wanna laugh at him cuz its so dang funny. But the next step up from there is his pterodactyl scream which makes me more than slightly twitchy so I guess that it all evens out in the end.

Caleb is funny the way he uses Momma and Dadda. He'll go for a week or two at a time and EVERYTHING will be "Momma". Its his favorite word. And I of course enjoy this no small amount. And then he'll go through a phase like right now where everything for the last week has been "Dadda" and I of course find this somewhat vexing. lol. I'm wondering if one of these days he's going to decide that he can use BOTH words. It will be very exciting.

Caleb is using more words all the time. Mostly he babbles constantly but he'll pair words occasionally now like "Oooh YEAH!" and "Oh Wow!" He's still stubbornly resisting learning the three words I'd REALLY like him to learn - which are "Food", "Drink" and "More" just because those would really help make my life run a little smoother. But he's very expressive with his earnest little face. And his voice can be surprisingly deep for such a little person. I'll be very interested to see how it goes as he gets older.

He is also increasingly affectionate. He's usually so very busy getting into stuff that he doesn't often just want to be held, but lately he's started when he's in the middle of playing with toys he'll stop, run over to me, and give me a great big hug or just cuddle for a minute. If I'm really lucky he'll give me a kiss. And then he hops back down and goes back to getting into stuff but I love it just the same. It always makes me feel like a million bucks.

Caleb has gone through another growth spurt recently. He can now wear 2T and 3T sized clothes (although 3T is a little big still). I just can't believe how tall he is. I look at him and I'm like "Oh my gosh! You're a little boy now! Where did my baby go?" This does mean he can now climb on to both the love seat and the sofa and the coffee table and most chairs which has made life all sorts of interesting in that "repeated cardiac stress test" sort of way. We also had to buy a play yard to put around the computer desk because there was absolutely no way to keep him out of it now that he's so tall.

Caleb is also a Little Piggy addict. Be warned - if you do so much as "This little piggy went to market" you will be doing the whole thing at least a dozen times. Unless of course you're crafty and devious and you distract him with a round of "Eensy Weensy Spider" or something similar. Whats really adorable is he'll try to do it back to you sometimes. He doesn't say the exact words but the inflections are all correct. Its really, really cute to watch.

He loves to read books. Lately, instead of bringing the book to me to read to him, he's taken to sitting on the floor and reading the book to himself. He points at the pictures and the words and just babbles away and laughs. Those have to be some dang good story lines the way he carries on.

Also we're up to 7 teeth now. He's got 4 in the front center on top, two on bottom and he's got one of his right molars coming in. I some how thought he'd get the other two on bottom first but he's apparently decided to go for the gusto. Lets just say that "Teething Tablets" are my friends.

We have had some problems with Mr Caleb hitting people in the face. Used to be you'd just grab his hand and say "No no" or plop him on the floor and he'd stop but then he decided it was a great game and funny. Oh and he was tall enough that standing on the floor, if you're sitting on the couch he can still smack you in the face, which was NOT okay.

And since I've yet to reach the point of "kid smacks you, so you smack him back and say "Don't hit!"" making sense to me, so we have instituted Time Out. Yes, if he hits and won't stop, then I dump him in the portacrib I have set up in the corner for just such a purpose. And he gets to sit in there, with no toys while I ignore him for a whole 2-3 minutes. Oh the horrors!

Good news is that its working. There has been a MARKED decrease in the hitting phenomenon since we started with Time Out. So apparently this barbarous cruelty is effective. Cool.

And since this is reaching epic lengths we'll stop for now. I can gush about my sweet baby for extended periods of time. lol

Caleb 16 Months

The alternate title for this post could read: Meet Mr. Chatterbox

Mr Caleb seems to have decided that this talking thing is cool after all and worth practicing. And I have to say its dang funny to listen to him.

Just this morning he looked at the cat and went "No, no no no no no no! Ooow!" He picked up "Ow!" yesterday from me after he totally beaned me in the nose and I went "Oooh! OW!" and he looks at me and matching my inflection perfectly "Ooow!" It was so dang cute. I was like "Thats RIGHT! It hurts! Oww!"

And Mr Caleb can now say "Nigh Nigh" for "Night Night" and "Ah- dah" for "All Done" and "Ooh!" for "Hello!" and "No no" which thankfully has not yet achieved favored word status and is still a little more "nuh nuh" than straight out "no".

He can say really clearly "Yeah!" which is just really adorable.

Its really cute because he's started not only imitating our speech but trying to mimic our inflection. So he can usually get the major syllable of a word and match its inflection to repeat back to you what your saying. So you get things like "Oh no!" becoming "Ohhh O!" as he looks at you anxiously after repeating what you said.

So I accidentally stole this toy from my Mom's house - I swear I was packing in such a hurry I just went "baby toy = pack" and threw it in my suit case, and its this "Light Up Alphabet Apple" and Caleb used to get really frustrated using it. Because it would be like "What letter makes this sound? 'EErrr!'" and he wouldn't get it right and I think he could tell and he'd get frustrated and yell at it and push it away. The toy is wayyy above his developmental level (ie "Where is the X-Ray Fish?") but the scary thing is - its like his favorite toy now and he's starting to figure it out.

I do think that the sound track for it may actually be seared to the core of my soul now I've heard it so many times it makes me twitchy to think of it but he loves that thing and it calls out to you and plays music for a while after you touch it to come back and play before it says "Bye bye!" and shuts off. Well he will come over, turn it on, play with it for a bit, then walk away but once it stops making noise he will come back to turn it on again and then go back to playing.

This is one of those times I'm grateful I'm half deaf or I'd go truly insane.

In other exciting news Caleb actually has enough hair on top of his head I can brush it now. Its a nice sandy blonde and from the texture I think this is his big boy hair growing in finally. Its really adorable.

Caleb 15.5 Months

So I think I got a little spoiled. I had the worlds best behaved baby for so long that it was a shock when he started walking and suddenly decided he had an opinion about things. I learned then to be grateful that for the most part Caleb was still a very mellow, even tempered easy going baby because when he decided not to be... you would sooner talk water in to rolling up hill than get that child to do something he didn't want to do.

But I would still get compliments and questions from strangers who spent any amount of time with him. The questions were almost invariably "Is he always this good??" and the compliments were something to the tune of "Wow. He was SO good!"

So you can see why I consider myself insanely lucky to be the mother of the worlds best baby. But I have to admit the last 2 weeks have been a serious challenge. Caleb is working on a couple of teeth at a time now and it has made him extremely less than happy about things.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly he can alternate from being completely and totally charming to be absolutely horrible. One minute he's happy and laughing and playing and the next some mysterious force will shift and he's suddenly screaming his little head off and thats nothing you can do to soothe him. It becomes extremely frustrating extremely quickly to be screamed at for no good reason.

But on the other hand I've had some sweet experiences of late. When we were with my folks a few weeks back my Dad was working hard on getting Caleb to say 'I love you'. He got as far as (repeated one word at a time) "Ah.... of..... Oooh!" It was really dang cute. So the other day I was sitting there with Caleb on my lap practicing this and we got as far as "Ah.... of" and while I was praising him for the "love/of" bit Caleb all on his own finished with "Momma!" and hugged me.

I almost cried I was so happy. We had a good cuddle with Mommy repeatedly telling him that he was the absolute bestest baby in the whole world and I'd definitely keep him. :)

And for another kudos to me - for MONTHS Caleb's favorite word was "Dada!" and he would say it over and over and over again. And you'd have me sitting there going "Say Momma! Say Momma! Mooooommma!"  (And he could he'd done it before but almost never when I was IN the room). And Caleb would just look up and me and smile and go "Dada!" And I'd tell him he was a good boy if a rotten snot. And Adam would laugh and tell him he was a good boy.

Well, now he's decided the favorite word is "Momma!" which I am 110% okay with. And the other day I overheard Adam sitting with Caleb going "Say Dada! Dada!" and Caleb smirked at him and happily said "Momma!" I called out "Good boy!"

I tell you, most of the time I do have the bestest baby in the whole world.

We did find (a pharmacy tech recommended them and a couple of friends) some homeopathic little tablets that like melt instantly in his mouth called "Teething Tablets" that do seem to be helping some with the extreme teething crabbiness. I'm glad b/c these are like microdoses of herbs and claim to be completely harmless (hasn't killed any of my friends kids anyways) and I was feeling bad dosing the poor kid with tylenol every 4 hours when he was awake just so I wouldn't kill him b/c that tylenol is really hard on your liver.

This too shall pass. I think I'm really grateful I'm not pregnant right now because it would be even harder to keep from losing my temper if I was hormonal pregnant psycho chick. Its particularly hard because he is so big and he weighs so much, and when he's upset he like wants to climb up you like you're a jungle gym or something and those hard boney little toes digging into your stomach and thighs really fricking hurt. Add that to the screaming in your ear and life becomes dramatically unpleasant.

I guess the biggest things are the fear that something else is wrong and that I can't make it better either way. I'd take him into the doctor but he was worse last week and we did see the doc for his check up and everything was perfect. He doesn't have a fever or any other symptoms just new toofies and CRABBINESS. And I've tried everything but giving the kid whiskey (which a shockingly large number of people have suggested I do) and nothing has made him happy.

Oh well. As my friend Ruth reminded me today: This too shall pass.

PS - I'll post more pictures soon. Its just hard with my wonky camera....