Thursday's Date with Caleb - My Gym

The birthday party that Jacob went to last weekend gave me a great idea for another date with Caleb this week! I took him to "My Gym" - they offer those "free trial classes" in the hopes of getting people to sign up for their programs. They are super fun, I'm sure, but completely impossible if you have more than one child! So this was Caleb's chance - we went on Thursday morning and he LOVED it. He was the oldest one in that class (the class went up to 22 months, which he is) - I probably should have put him in the next class up (22 months - 30 months or something like that) because he was sort of like a steamroller over some of the babies in there. I had MANY a mom comment about how advanced he was, or how quickly/well he was doing some of the....obstacles? (not sure of what word to use for their stuff). I told them has 3 older siblings, and that seemed to explain a lot for them!

The trampoline was one of his favorite things. This picture says it all - see the baby in the background? Just sort of standing and perhaps leaning up and down on it? Well, Caleb would climb up there, fully jump 2 or 3 times and then come landing down like Superman flat out on his belly. He thought it was hilarious!

Of COURSE the ball pit was a huge hit!

They had this time at the end of class where they asked the parents to leave their kids and go out into the waiting area. The goal of this 5 minutes was to work on "separation anxiety" I think with the kids. Several of the parents stayed in there and just backed up a few feet away from their kids. Caleb, on the other hand, didn't even notice that I had left. He was totally fine! :) So funny how different kids are. I'm sure that 95% of the moms in there only had this one child, and I remember those days (sort of) with Josiah. It was fun to get to pretend for a few hours that Caleb was the only one! :) He loved it!

The class instructor was trying to convince me to sign Caleb up for classes by saying "look how well Caleb is doing? he's really loving it!" i told him that I KNOW Caleb is loving it, but I have 3 other kids and I never have ONLY Caleb with me. He stopped trying to get me to sign up after that! :) We had a fun morning together though!

Courtney's Boys

One of my oldest and dearest friends, Courtney, is in Rwanda with her husband and 3 kids (their 2 year old stayed home with grandparnts). They just passed court and are now the proud parents of two more boys they adopted from there - Lincoln and Levi (almost 3 and almost 1)!!! Click here to see it: www.cassadas.blogspot.com

What an amazing testimony of God's faithfulness when His children step out in faith and obedience!!!

Wednesday's Date with Caleb - the Pool

On Wednesday, I arranged a play date at our pool with two of Caleb's little buddies! It's not often that we get together with HIS little peeps, so this was a special treat!

All of my kids have loved the water, but this boy is a fish!! He is seriously about swimming on his own. Can swim back to the steps, loves to do flips under water, jumps in all on his own and pops back up - it's a riot. Am going to have to video him one day when David swims with us.

We sat at the steps and squirted the water gun about 1000 times. Over and over and over again. But no one was there to take it out of his hands, or squirt him back - and he LOVED it!!! Over and over again! :)

Baby Drew was one of our buddies that came - he's almost 10 weeks old, and his mom is my friend Shelley that was my first piano student! I taught her piano for several months before Drew was born, and she sang with us in the choir when she was at Northside. It was GREAT to see her again and get to love on Mr. Drew!! Our other buddy David came too, but he's 2 1/2 and it's awfully hard to get pictures of little people his age when you're swimming! We had a great time though and look forward to doing it again soon!

Go Blowfish!

As part of a reading incentive program at the school sponsored by the Columbia Blowfish Baseball Team, the boys both read enough books to win the Home Plate Awards! They each won 4 tickets to the game, a free hot dog and soda, and the opportunity to walk in the pre-game parade! They were super excited! Who doesn't love a summer night at the ballpark? :) We left Callie and Caleb with Noah's mom, and he came along with us.

Some VERY excited boys!

Go PHES cougars!!! This is their wonderful principal - Mrs. Mitchum. She is WONDERFUL and I am SO thankful for her!

Walking across in the parade. The boys were in their own world talking about video game characters and almost stayed at the fence while the rest of their school walked out!!

Here's their school - they are WAY at the end of the line...almost didn't make it! :)

It was a really fun night. Small stadium. Not even a Triple A team I don't think - I think it's the level right below that. But very family friendly. It was a free night for us. Boys loved it and didn't know any different. We were 4 rows away from the field. They had the most hilarious mascot (Blowie) and little Blowie Jr. that absolutely were a riot!

A fun (and late!) evening for all of us. There's something relaxing about sitting outside on a summer night watching a ball game. (as David pointed out it was probably relaxing because we didn't have a 4 year old girl talking non-stop or a 1 year old boy that wanted to walk all over the stadium) :)

My Tuesday Date with Caleb

I knew I wanted to really enjoy my alone time with Caleb this week while the older kids were at VBS. Time with JUST him is SO rare that I planned out a few special dates for us this week. On Tuesday, we went to storytime....for 1 year olds!!! We go to storytime every week...but it's always been Callie's storytime. It makes more sense for him to sit in on the 3-4 year old storytime than for Callie to sit in on the 1 year olds. So today we got to go to HIS age group. We went a little bit early so we would be sure to have time to play puzzles. We LOVE puzzles!

Then we headed in for storytime. Lots of fun songs, great books, fingerplays, etc. We read a book about the beach, and then all the kids got these streamers to pretend they were seaweed!! :)

At the very end they did a puppet show which was a HUGE hit - Caleb kept pointing as the animal puppets came out and showing me! :) The other hilarious thing was that he kept looking around and pointing at all the other kids and saying "baby" over and over again. I think he thinks he's 4 years old - and they were all babies. Little does he know that most of them were the same age as him!! :) It was a fun morning!

Callie's Dog

Meet Callie's dog - whose name she told me today is "Cassada". :) Is it a little obvious that we're talking an awful lot about our sweet friends on their trip to Rwanda these days? :)

Off the Deep End

Yep. Pretty sure I just jumped off the deep end. I bought 20 coupons on ebay. I had bought a groupon for ebay a couple of months ago, so it was practically free for me. i'm pretty sure that makes me totally crazy.

Let the Week Begin!

This was the start to a FUN week!! The kids were super excited to go to a VBS this week at a church near us. They were doing a different theme than we are doing at Northside next week, so they were very excited to get to do 2 VBSs!! :) Callie was the most excited because she got to do it too (it starts at 4 year olds!). So on Monday morning, Caleb and I dropped all the big kids off (plus our neighbor Noah who went with the boys) and then headed back home just us!! I wondered how it would be with only Caleb. I had some special things planned for him and I for the rest of the week, but Monday is my cleaning day so we were just at home. He was so happy and content - I think glad not to be harrassed or messed with or squealed at for a little while! I wondered if he would be Mr. Clingy without anyone else there to play with, but he was SO happy just to play! :) I was able to get my house cleaned in record time (it's amazing how much quicker it goes when you don't have 4 kids undoing everything you are trying to do, or having to stop your cleaning in order to break up fights, put kids in time out, answer the "what can I do" question a million times, etc! :) The time went by quickly and we were happy to pick the kids up at noon. We went to Salsarita's that night for dinner and enjoyed kids' night there with our neighbors (who had NEVER been there - shocking!). Kids eat free, Mr. Balloon man there, great food - it doesn't get any better! :) We were off to a good start!

This boy loves him some queso!! Who doesn't, right?

We had a dragon head, two octopuses, 1 T-rex, a unicorn, and a car. Whew - we gave Mr. Balloon guy quite a strange request list!

This is Noah's little brother, Max. He and Caleb are just about 2 weeks apart, and Max is ALL about dinosaurs these days!! He loved his t-rex hat! :)

Our list is up!

There are a few random things at the end there, but they were specifically requested by the kids (i.e. "make a craft" and "science experiment" - what does that mean? don't know - but they wanted it on there!) My heart was happy when Jacob wanted to add "Tell People About Jesus!" :)

Can you tell which was the first item checked off tonight? :) It made me happy!!

Aaaahhhh....a free Saturday!

It was so nice to be able to wake up on Saturday and know that the whole day was ahead of us - and pretty much free to do what we wanted! That doesn't happen all that often, so we were ready to enjoy it! After heading out for a run, I showered and helped do some decorating at church for VBS next week. Jacob had a birthday party for a friend from his kindergarten class that lives in our neighborhood. It was at My Gym, so he was very excited about that!

Jacob, the birthday girl Ava, and Trinity (another friend from his class...Callie LOVES swimming at the pool with her...they are alot alike! :) )

We enjoyed some time at the pool in the afternoon and then tried to eat dinner early so we could get some tired kids in bed. Josiah started going downhill fast around 3 pm - I know he was flat exhausted from camp - so we were trying to get him to bed as quick as we could!

I had bought some fabulous looking artichokes this week to have as a celebration dinner when Josiah got back home. I told Jacob they were about as big as Caleb's head, so he had to test it out! :)

EVERYONE in this family loves artichokes! (although Josiah is the only one that likes his dipped in butter - everyone else (even David, whom I recently converted) prefers mayo!!)

I'm not sure how Caleb manages to eat these with hardly any teeth, but he LOVES them! Kept saying "mo, mo, mo" - as in "more, more more!"

YUM! The full bowl signifies lots of YUMMY artichoke eaten! :)