We love to PLAY!

December 9-15, 2013

Sometimes Caleb can be Mr. Destructo

Caleb's toys like play under the tree. Notice the finished tree skirt!

Caleb also helped me work on Ben's present. I made him a college cookbook and an apron that says Hot Stuff.

I love my kids so much! They bring so much joy to my life and to our home.

Caleb loves making Leila laugh and she loves when he plays with her.

How did I get so lucky?!

They LOVE playing chase!

Allen is such a great Dad

Here's what Allen wrote to his brother, Sam (a missionary in California):

Well, life has been busy for us.  Kids are great, and adorable :)  but, I am a little biased.  Caleb is now learning so many new words.  Usually, he surprises me everyday with some new word I haven't heard him say before....today's word, "Crab".  We were taking a bath, and he was telling us how hard it was to line up all the bath toys on the 'edge' of the bathtub.  He went through the line of animals, "duck, turtle, octupus, ....THAT!"...(Caleb's way of asking, what's that?), so we told him it was a crab...so from then on he would go through the lined-up animals as say them all out loud, including crab, and say how 'hard' it was to keep them all on the edge without falling into the bath.  He's getting to be a real boy.

Leila is also growing, just much slower than Caleb did.  Her disorder also helps to keep her small...she is still in 3 month old clothing, even though she is coming up on 9 months old tomorrow.  Even though she's small, she's starting to grow up.  She's now scooting around the house.  She hasn't figured out how to crawl yet, but she's getting good at getting up on all fours...and then pushes herself actually backwards from where she wants to go.  That's usually just before they figure out the coordination to move forward.  So hopefully she'll be able to crawl here in the next week or so...that will make her much more happy!  She really loves to watch Caleb...whatever he's doing.  He is very good at making her laugh, and usually, she'll laugh and anything he does for/to her.  Caleb really is a good big brother to her.  We'll have to send you some pictures sometime.

So next Wednesday, we are driving to Utah for Christmas.  We leave Wednesday night, and hopefully will be in Utah Thursday night...and I sure hope the roads are good and that the weather is nice to us... I just looked, and it's supposed to be snowing on the day we are driving through Utah...ugh, well, we'll see what happens.

Comments from me: Caleb really is a big boy, especially in the new suit we just got him! He's got a great imagination too! He plays pretend a lot! Leila will take much longer than a week to start crawling since she is still building up the strength to do so. We've been working on it for a long time already.

Helping Dad rotate the van tires

Reindeer from Santa

Chillin' so mom can get ready for church

Caleb will jump and run on the trampoline for as many hours as we will let him.

Our neighbor gifts: pretzels with melted Hugs and M&Ms

Here's the picture we attached, just to make sure they know who we are

Saturday we took the kids to sit on Santa's lap... Caleb wouldn't sit on his lap or talk to him. He just acted scared, tried to hide and tried not to cry while we were there. But then the whole way home and all day today he's been excitedly saying to us, "Santa... reindeer...Caleb...he nice." Translation: "Santa gave Caleb a reindeer. He's nice!" :) Positive memory of a traumatic experience, he forgot the scared and just remembers the reindeer toy, cookie and juice he got.

This week we had an ECI appointment, endocrinology appointment and dentist appointments for Al and I.