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.