Arbor Day and Burglars

January 16-22, 2012
The only family updates are about things that happen on the weekend because during the week Allen goes to work and I stay home with Caleb. After work Allen has been studying for his actuarial exam in May. I'll get a picture of him studying in there one of these days. Other than that the only other thing that happened during the week was that I went to Activity Days on Thursday (do fun activities with 8-9 year-old girls at church twice a month). Oh, and Caleb and I were sick.

Going to the Arbor Day festivities

Saturday was exciting: it was Arbor Day so we went to The Woodlands' Arbor Day celebration. Caleb will enjoy it when he's older, but we got a bunch of free trees to plant!

Getting our trees to plant

But the real Saturday excitement happened that night. Caleb went to bed early, Allen and I watched a movie and were going to bed... perfect timing, as always, Caleb woke up so I went to feed him. His room was unusually bright and then Allen noticed people snooping in our backyard. It was the police. Our neighbors behind us had been robbed and the robbers hid the two iPads under our cement drain cover thing. They used the GPS to find out that the iPads were close-by and then used some pinging app to listen for the iPads. They followed the noise to find them buried by our porch. They had disabled the GPS on one of them and deleted all of her apps and everything but didn't have time to do that to the second iPad, which is probably why they ditched them to come back for them later.

I got a picture of the police dusting for fingerprints from our upstairs window

On Sunday the woman who had been robbed came over to our house. Apparently they think it's a bunch of teenagers who live in the area because they have broken in to two or three houses on that street multiple times. Their alarm systems usually go off a few minutes after they have left the home. Although they found her and her husband's iPads, her jewelry is gone.


Caleb Updates:  Week 15

Caleb laughed his first real laugh! He has laughed in his sleep a lot but this time was because he thought Dad was being funny.

He talking more and more. Here's a long video of him talking and a shorter one.

He is a very distracted eater... while eating, he looks at the designs on my shirt, pulls the strings on my hoodies, turns to look at anyone who is talking. Because he plays so much while eating, sometimes I can't tell when he's full. Even though I know he can't really understand and can't answer me, I tell him, "If you're not done yet, then you need to keep eating." In response, he fakes like he is going to eat for a second, but before latching on, he turns his head and gives me a big smile. After two or three times of that, I have usually decided he's finished. Even with his playing, Caleb has cut his eating time from 45 minutes to 20-30 minutes! Yippee!

Sometimes when he is eating, his little hand and fingers find their way directly into my bare armpit... it tickles so badly!!! But now he has started to laugh with me when I laugh and I love it.

Sitting in Mom's chair

My legs are blurry in every picture because I'm always moving them.

Example of the constant crunch... Even when trying to sit in a chair, his legs are lifted

The past couple of times he has fallen asleep in his carseat, he has slumped over forward because he does a constant crunch against the restraining belt things.

He has developed a whimper cry that he does when he eats or sucks on his pacifier.

This week he was sick and I had to use the bulb syringe to clear his nose, but after I did it one or two times, he started breathing in through his nose every time I would try to suck it out! This was counter-productive.

The most effective nose-clearing we had this week was when he spit up out of his nose... haha! He was sucking on my finger and didn't break the suction when he spit up and we were both surprised as two streams of spit up came running out of his nose.

Caleb likes to kick his toys.

Caleb still loves his bath but now relaxes more than splashing sometimes. His bathtub has a little ledge-ish thing that hold him from sliding down too deep but he has started to do hip thrusts to lift his bum up and over the ledge so he can slouch in the bath. This means Mom has to always be ready to catch him because his head will go all the way under when he does his little hip thrust. I'm not sure how slouching like that is comfortable because the ledge then digs into his lower back... but he likes it!

Caleb started sleeping with his monkey/blanky/lovey. It's great because he can pull the monkey's face to his mouth easily to suck on and it's soft so he likes to run his fingers over it. He is great at pulling his binky out of his mouth but hasn't figured out how to get it back in again yet.

Caleb loves looking at the pictures in books!

He touches each page.

For the first time ever, Caleb took two naps in his crib in one day. That was awesome. I loved it.