Sick Week

June 18-24, 2012

Caleb shows his love by putting his forehead up to yours and then talking to you.

I wasn't close enough so he had to grab my face and pull me closer.

Monday morning when I went to get Caleb out of his crib, I was met with a pleasant surprise: he was sitting up in bed! This was the first time he had gotten himself into a sitting position on his own! The next few mornings and naptimes were the same . . . sitting up, looking at Mom as I came in to rescue him from the crib.

He pulls to a stand on everything but hasn't thought about doing it in this crib yet, luckily!

Allen got sick this week. None of us were feeling great on Father's Day. Monday I felt terrible and started feeling better by Tuesday. Allen just kept getting worse and worse. Wednesday and Thursday he stayed home from work, with his fever peaking at 102 F. Friday he was still sick but couldn't stay home another day because things are so busy at work.

Caleb trying to help Dad feel better

While Allen spent most of this week not really in the land of the living, Caleb started teething again and had a lot of rough nights. It was all around a pretty rough week. I could tell as soon as the cough syrup wore off because Allen sounded like he was going to cough up a lung. It frequently coincided with Caleb's waking up so I would load Allen up on drugs again and have him check his temperature before I got back into bed. At least we had some very effective cough syrup left over from my episode of swine flu a couple years ago.

He loves to watch the washing machine after we put the clothes in

Caleb began to be a picky eater this week. He wants to eat anything I eat, so I shared my goldfish and smoothies with him (I can't remember if I wrote this before, but Caleb got over his dairy allergy sometime in May!). Other than that, all he would eat were sweet potatoes, peas, puffs and apple juice. He would have none of the other pureed foods! I cut up a pear to give him some different finger food to eat since he loves to feed himself, but the texture of it didn't go down so well . . . it was his first big boy vomit as all of his puffs and the pear came right back up. I forgot how disgusting throw up smells! We both changed clothes after he took a bath.

Caleb loves looking at shadows and tries to grab them. It's pretty funny when we move one of our hands around and he chases the shadow! Eventually he looks up and sees our hands and the game is over but then he falls for it again later.

One day his favorite toy was the spatula... he even brought it to the pool.

Caleb has also started having temper tantrums when he doesn't get what he wants. He is getting pretty good at communicating what he wants, which is why I think he gets so frustrated when he doesn't get it. He flails his body backward in an arch while screaming. He has hit his head on the wall a couple of times when throwing a fit while I was holding him and now looks around before arching his back when I'm holding him. The arch is very strong and makes it very difficult to get him in his carseat when he doesn't want to be in it. One time he did it when I was trying to put him in his stroller and he almost flipped himself off the back of it as his feet pushed off of the seat.

Feverish Daddy in his sweats while it's 100+ F outside.

Close up to show how he grabs the ball with his toes and fingers.

 He uses his feet all of the time. One time I was watching in the baby monitor to see if he was asleep yet and saw him feel around with his feet until he found his extra pacifier. He couldn't see it because of his belly, but he grabbed it between both feet and then brought it up to grab with his hands. I was impressed! Then while I was changing his diaper, I put the diaper below his feet. He did the same thing: felt around and then grabbed the diaper between his feet and brought it up to his hands. Our son is a monkey!
  
Caleb is still very fascinated with hands. He will stare at my hand for longer than he will watch Baby Einstein or Baby Signing Time. If I don't open and close it, he will open and close it for me. He thought it was funny one time when I put my thumb in the middle of my fist so when I don't do that, he pushes my thumb in and then closes my fingers around it. Since then, when he is staring at his hand he makes it into a fist and puts his thumb in the middle too sometimes.

Caleb also does not like being left in the car when the car is stopped or when one person gets out and he doesn't. For example, the Civic's battery died on Monday while Allen was at work. When he got home, we had to drive to Walmart to buy a new one. Allen got out of the car while Caleb and I kept driving around in the parking lot since we couldn't turn the car off and have it turn back on without jumping it again. The second Allen got out and Caleb realized he wasn't going to get out, he cried and cried and cried.

Caleb kept giving me kisses . . . notice the slobber dripping down the side of my face.

We had another slide mishap at the pool this week! Saturday we went to an awesome pool that was a lot of fun and they had a family slide. Your family all can sit side-by-side and go down together, but you can't do a train or have anyone sit on your lap. . . not even Caleb. So Caleb went between Allen and I while we each held an arm and leg of his. Without any swimsuit drag, I started picking up speed and spinning around. I don't think Caleb even touched the slide the whole way down.

When we hit the water, I went almost all the way under because my feet were still on the slide when my butt hit the water. Allen made the same mistake I did last time I took Caleb down a slide and dunked both of us; he forgot to put his feet down. He went all the way under! Miraculously, Caleb's head didn't even touch the water. He was scared though and Allen and I were laughing hysterically once we came up. Somehow I managed to sit on Allen's head while he was underwater!

Giving Mom kisses

Random thought: we live in such a beautiful place! Every time we go on walks or run (which is every day) I am amazed at all of the tall, green trees and the flowers and all of the birds (cardinals, hawks, ... I don't know the names of any others) and butterflies we see! I am not so fond of the mosquitoes since I frequently have 10+ bites on my legs and arms. We have also seen some not so common wildlife recently. There was a fox in the road when I was driving home from activity days one night! And on the way home from church last week there was a giant vulture near the side of the road. I couldn't tell what he was eating.

Lizzi's Visit and Allen's First Father's Day

June 11th-17th, 2012

He loves Aunt Lizzi! And look how green our backyard is getting.

It was so fun to have Lizzi here! She stayed from Saturday night until Thursday morning. I don't know if she had that much fun but I loved having her hang out with Caleb and I all day. She even turned into an old geezer like us, in bed by 9:30 pm most nights. 

  

Unfortunately for Lizzi, Caleb was teething while she was here. That meant he was grumpy and clingy to Mom most of the time he was awake and he slept a lot. One thing I like about Caleb teething is that after a couple of rough nights, he makes up for it by sleeping well for the next couple of nights and taking long naps. He took such long naps while Lizzi was here and even slept in until 7:45 one morning! 

Here's Caleb's pirate look

I don't think Caleb is following a normal teething pattern either, he has his two bottom middle teeth but just got his two top right teeth instead of the two middle ones. He is lopsided. He likes to grind his teeth together, and the sound of it gives me the heebeejeebies every time. It not only sounds sick but looks funny because he has to push his lower jaw to the side to line up his teeth. 

Caleb likes to pull himself to a stand everywhere, including the bathtub and while nursing (I tried to get a picture with my phone once because it is so awkward). On Monday he decided that he wanted to start walking... but he skipped the walking part and went straight to running everywhere!  
 
For the first couple of days he was like on of the old Nintendo guys running: his legs just moved up and down but didn't actually propel him forward. By Wednesday he was running laps around our house (with a lot of support, of course). He loves the higher view (as opposed to crawling).

Monday night while Caleb was taking a four hour nap (!) we worked on building our bed. I don't think I wrote about this last week but I can't remember... on Saturday Allen and I went to the lumberyard with Caleb in the back seat of the Civic and still managed to fit all of the wood in there! Incredible! I should have taken a picture. It's fun to have a project to do together.  

Here's the headboard.

We woke Caleb up for cake and ice cream (he just ate prunes) and played for a while before putting him back to sleep.

Happy Birthday Lizzi!

Tuesday afternoon while Caleb was taking a two hour nap (so much napping!), Lizzi and I were watching Cheaper by the Dozen. All of the sudden the sky got dark as a huge thunderstorm rolled in. We watched the lightning and enjoyed the thunder until one bolt was so close that it made me jump about twenty feet. I texted Allen that we almost got hit by lightning. He thought I was exaggerating until he got home and saw fire trucks, police cars and an ambulance on the street behind ours. 

By then the storm had subsided and we went out to check out the damage, thinking it was a tree that got hit. Then we saw the house three down from us... the roof was almost all gone and you could see the red ashes still falling from inside the front door. Poor family! In car terms, their house was totaled. Allen told me later that there had been a deadly lightning warning issued. I didn't know that existed. 

We went to the pool every day with Lizzi and Wednesday Allen took a half day off of work to go with us. We got Wendy's on the way to the waterpark but when we got there it was closed because of the damage from the huge storm the night before. Not to be deterred, we went to another pool and had a blast. We practiced our kick flips and tried to take underwater pictures of us doing handstands and stuff (with the underwater disposable camera leftover from our honeymoon). Here are Caleb and I dancing during the safety break with Allen's amazing cinematographic skills.

This is the slide we went down and went under on.

Caleb loved all of the spraying water everywhere. Here is a video of him trying to catch the water. He was also a very good sport when I went down a water slide with him and we both accidentally went all the way under water! It was a tube slide made for kids so I couldn't sit up and was holding him near my chest. I guess I didn't anticipate the extra weight keeping me from being able to sit up and put my feet down when I came out! Oops! He didn't even cry though. 

I think I mentioned last week that Caleb loves books. This is one of his favorites, that we read before bed and in Sacrament meeting to keep him quiet. It is the ABC one my mom made for him.

Thursday morning we took Lizzi to the airport and then things were back to normal on Thursday and Friday... Allen went to work, Caleb and I went to the pool. Saturday we went to a baptism of another girl in our Primary class. Allen gave a great talk about baptism and I tried to keep Caleb from being too loud. He was in a very cute but talkative mood. 

Giving Momma kisses

After the baptism we went to the mall to get some new suits for Allen. Joseph A Banks (?) was having a great sale on some very nice suits and he needed a new one. Allen was looking for suits to try on as Caleb and I walked around the store. I held Caleb as Allen asked me for my opinion on a couple suits that he liked. And then it kind of felt like Caleb pooped so I held Caleb up to ask Allen if it smelled like Caleb had pooped... The look on Allen's face combined with his response, "I don't think I need to smell him," made me look down. My hand that was holding Caleb's thigh was also holding a handful of poop that had squirted out of his overalls. It was all over my shirt and all over Caleb. 

We rushed to the family bathroom for damage control. We stripped Caleb down, cleaned him up and put on his new onesie from the diaper bag. Luckily I had an undershirt on beneath my shirt (hence, the name undershirt) because my shirt was covered on the entire side where I had been holding Caleb. It was white and a little more see-through than I would have liked but not bad enough to go buy a new shirt. I just held Caleb over my front and the diaper bag over my back. 

Glad that that was over, we went back to the store, where Allen got two good-looking suits. Now we just have to wait for two weeks to go pick them up since they're being tailored. 

Happy Father's Day!

Sunday was Allen's first Father's Day as a father. Caleb and I made him a present that I forgot to get a picture of before he took it to work. I wrote a poem from Caleb's perspective about walking in his dad's footsteps and on either side of it I had Caleb's footprints. It was pretty simple but Allen loved it (or at least told me that he did). I also printed out recent pictures of Caleb for Allen to update his picture frames at work. And Allen got to sleep in and he got to take a long nap... because church was cancelled. They had just redone the gym floor and the fumes were too bad to use the building. 

This week we also watched a lot of soccer.

Caleb is 8 months old!

June 4th-10th, 2012

There is no need for us to buy Caleb toys; he is happier playing with household items: plastic cups, grocery bags (I know they are a choking hazard, so I watch closely), and our toothbrushes. He started playing with our tube of toothpaste while I was getting dressed for our run and wouldn't let me take it away. He was completely entertained by it for the first twenty minutes of our run! Caleb gets mad when I won't let him play with the toilet cleaning brush... it is no longer stored on the floor by the toilet.

Dad letting Caleb lick his jellybeans

Here is the video of Allen sharing jellybeans while they're watching soccer. What a great Saturday! Candy and soccer.

Caleb likes the baby swing at the park but really likes swinging on my lap. I think I was in second grade the last time I did the spider (I think that's what we called it when one person sits on your lap and faces you on the swing). 

Caleb LOVES watching us brush our teeth and chewing on our toothbrushes so we got him one of his own.

Caleb will crawl to me to be picked up unless he wants something that is near him that he can't reach (like by the toilet paper roll in the bathroom). Then he will stay in the same spot and do his "pick me up" move and as soon as I pick him up, he lunges for whatever it was that he wanted. He has started pulling things off of our bookshelves. In some ways I guess I am very lucky that he is such a momma's boy. While I sometimes wish he would play by himself (with me in the same room) so I could get things done without holding him, it does keep him from getting in trouble because he almost always wants to be right where I am.

For example, if I am looking at the newspaper ads to see what's on sale at the grocery store, I am sitting on the floor next to him and give him a different ad. That's not good enough, he scoots until he is in my lap, holding the ad that I am holding. Or, sometimes I want to sit facing him so we can roll a ball back and forth... he won't do that for longer than two seconds. He immediately crawls back over until he is in my lap. Once he's in my lap he won't just sit there and do what I'm doing though. It is pretty cute!

He loves the dresser drawer handles and crawls to them whenever he's on the floor in our bedroom. He will lift one up and drop it down to make the loud noise and after doing that a few times will move to the next handle, until he has played with all four and then will turn around and repeat. Whenever he's on our bed, he immediately crawls to Mom's side of the bed and tries to climb off the edge to get the baby monitor on the floor below.

He liked the doorstop the day he found it for the first time but obviously wasn't that enthralled by it because he hasn't gone back to it since.

Caleb keeps getting bumps on his forehead. He doesn't face plant as much when going from sitting to crawling, it's a little more controlled. But he starts crawling fast and crawls into door jams. His poor little knees get all rugburned from crawling. His belly got all red when I had him in just his diaper one afternoon after the pool. Speaking of the pool, he also thinks he can crawl in the pool.

Caleb is now more interested in reading books than eating them (most of the time). He loves turning the pages!

Here is a video of Caleb just laughing with Mom and Dad. He was laughing really hard at me before we started filming.

When Caleb rocks his bumbo while eating, I put my hand on it to steady it. He has realized that I'm stopping him from rocking and tries to pull my hand off. He also pushes back across the table and I have to pull him back to me but he digs his heels in and is surprisingly strong! I think it's time for a high chair. He also thinks he needs to feed himself and takes the spoon away from me. He loses interest and drops the spoon after chewing on it for a while and no new food appears on it. Then I pick it back up and feed him a bite or two until he takes it away again.

Awww! I love them!

Thursday I had a pool party with the activity day girls, which was fun despite the rain. Saturday night Lizzi flew in (on her 19th birthday!) but I was so tired that I slept while Allen went to pick her up from the airport. I meant to get up to say hi but couldn't keep my eyes open to even talk to Allen, let alone get up. We celebrated her birthday with some cake bites the next day with our Primary class and then had cake with candles on Monday.

Funny story about the cake... I was going to make a double layer cake, which isn't hard and I have done hundreds of times (slight exaggeration). But I got new round cake pans and they were non-stick so I didn't spray them before putting the cake batter in. Bad decision. When trying to get the first cake out and onto the plate, it stuck... I could have pieced it back together with lots of frosting but it didn't seem worth it. So I just frosted the other half of the cake in the pan. I didn't want to waste the other half so I put it back in the mixer and added too much frosting to it and made balls out of it and stuck them in the freezer. They looked ugly and were super sticky by the time the kids in our church class ate them but they tasted alright. Two of the kids asked if I could teach their moms how to do it.

May 28-June 3, 2012

This was a three-day weekend for Allen because of Memorial Day! We had fun playing soccer in the morning and then went to a barbecue for lunch at a friend's house. The afternoon ended up being really lazy... we all took naps and watched the end of season one of Downton Abbey (a PBS series one of Allen's co-workers recommended and let us borrow).

On Monday I did get a chance to use my athletic training skills (go athletic trainer! woo! woo! woo!). When we pulled up to the field to play soccer, there was a dad pitching to his kids and as we were getting out of our car he nailed his son in the face. The kid was crying and bleeding everywhere, his sister looked like she was going to throw up and the dad was freaking out and kept saying, "I'm sorry! I think I broke your nose! Your mom's going to kill me!"

Hint to all dads: even if you think you broke your kid's nose, don't say it. It just makes things worse. Also, don't make him think his mom is going to get mad at him for getting hurt. I grabbed some tissues out of our car and ran over and asked if I could help. I made sure there weren't any broken bones, got the boy to calm down and got him cleaned up. Even though it was something little, it felt good to do something athletic training related again.

On Monday Caleb had some major constipation problems that pedialax helped resolve but then he was afraid to poop. Tuesday night Caleb woke up screaming for an hour and it's either because it still hurt or he was afraid it would hurt. Poor guy! We now feed him prunes every day.

That must have worn him out because Wednesday night he had his best night ever! He slept from 8:30 pm until 5 am! Unfortunately that night I ended up being awake from 12:15 am-3:15 am... just laying in bed, praying I would fall back to sleep. Then Thursday night he was up all night again, which meant I was up again. No wonder I got sick!

Caleb and I have started going swimming every day now. He isn't sure how much he likes his floatie yet and definitely prefers to be held. He still loves the water. At our house he tries to grab the stream of water as it comes out of the faucet whenever I wash his hands.

What a cute sleeping boy!

Caleb pulled to a stand on his own for the first time. He does it frequently with some assistance but this time he wanted the fingernail clippers I put on top of the diaper box and pulled himself up on the box to reach them. He also has started sort of crawling on his hands and knees but then it is slower and just plops back on his stomach to army crawl.

Allen had a busy week and had to work late a couple of nights but we had a good weekend. Saturday we played soccer again (yay! I have missed playing!) and then went to the pool with some of Allen's friends/coworkers and their families. Then, after we made another trip to Harbor Freight to buy more tools, (and once the garage was nice and hot) Allen worked on his car again.

Sunday after church Caleb was invited to celebrate his friend's one year-old birthday. There were four blonde hair, blue eyed little babies there and Caleb kept crawling over and kissing one of the girls. We're in trouble! Kissing girls already! He's not even eight months old yet... He has been really kissy recently. I love when he gives me big slobbery kisses. After a few kisses I have drool running in rivers down my shirt. I love when he pulls away after giving me a big kiss on the cheek and he gives me a big smile that says, "I love you." Then I always have to extract my hair from between his little fingers. Almost every kiss is accompanied by my hair being pulled.