15 month old C

What a fun three months that it has been!  So full of changes for my little guy.  He is so much fun.  I love this age of constant exploration...(although, I must confess that it does wear me out!)

I joke and say that he's going to think his name is "O'Caleb!"  I say it constantly.  He's always getting into something or doing something that he shouldn't.  I always reply with 'Oh Caleb!'...probably with much exasperation in my voice at times but with amusement too.  He is a busy, busy little boy.  (Although, they probably all are!)

C is a climber.  He scales everything.  He loves climbing on the couch.  For a while, he was constantly attempting to climb the clothes racks.  He loves the stairs (although he took a header down them today and is steering clear of them for now).  He climbs on chairs so that he can crawl up onto the table to find any remaining goodies.  Jut knows when C has had an adventurous day when he comes home and finds all the kitchen chairs sitting on their sides.  He climbs on the portable heater in the bathroom so that he can terrorize poor Pumpkin while she's trying to eat.  He climbs up into the benches on the breakfast nook so that he can create havoc with all our school supplies.   He tries climbing up to E's bunk...thankfully he can't manage to get higher than the first step yet. But if he can climb it and find something on it, he does.  I thought the other kids liked climbing but they had nothing on C!  He truly loves climbing.  Thankfully he hasn't thought about climbing out of the crib, yet.

He has sprouted 5 teeth in the past 3 months, I think.  He has in 3 of his molars and 2 of his incisors have broke through in the past week or so.  So, he is up to 13 teeth.  Yippee.

Crawling is a forgotten skill.  Walking (and attempted running) is all the rage.  We visited the Whitakers after Christmas and their little guy (who is 6 weeks younger than C) was a 'seasoned' walker.  C watched him for a while and by the end of the day, C was a walker too.  It took another week for him to really hone his skill and not take off crawling in the middle of his treks but he left crawling behind at the Whitakers.  Now, I really can't keep up with all his mischief.  He just disappears and mischief finds him.

Talking isn't his forte, but he's learning to get his points across.  I sign to him and he just grins and says, "aegh" and keeps pointing.  He clicks his tongue when he wants something to eat.  He jabbers and jabbers and jabbers.  He's always talking.  Someday we will know what he's saying.

He LOVES reading.  He loves climbing up in the chair by the bookshelves and pulling out books and reading.  I get tired of cleaning all the books up, but it entertains him for probably at least 30 minutes a day...so I can't really complain because it does keep him occupied and out of trouble.

C loves wrestling.  If the olders are on the floor, he's going to pounce on them.  It drives them nuts when they are trying to watch TV.  If I'm holding the olders reading, he'll plow his way through to sit in the middle of my lap.  He can be a bit of a tank.  But, he wants to be involved and be in the middle of what is going on.

He is such a happy little guy.  I love this (exhausting) age.  He makes me laugh every day!

A Little Christmas

My household is a *touch* on the active side.  Okay...so things are pretty busy around here.  The 1-year old is especially busy and doesn't adhere to many rules.  Consequently, I decided that I was not going to put up any of my 'real' decorations this year.  I had visions of our tree crashing to the floor and the mess that would follow.  Besides, I didn't want to be after C all the time about leaving the tree alone...and I didn't want to have to gate it.  So, handmade ornaments were in our future for the month of December.

On Black Friday, one of the blogs I subscribe to discussed the ebook The Truth in Tinsel.  The premise is to do a short devo with your kids each day of December leading up to Christmas and make a corresponding Christmas ornament.  Perfect!  It followed right along with my desire for homemade ornaments...and the desire of my kids to do 'crafty' things.

I was worried that we wouldn't have enough ornaments to decorate the tree at the beginning...but as we didn't decorate the tree until the 20th (or something similarly ridiculous), it wasn't a problem.  The 'problem' became storing the ornaments waiting for the tree to be ready...oh well.  

It was fun.  We made lots of different types of ornaments ranging from old CDs with glass beads glued on to symbolize Mary's Song to salt-dough mangers to paper dolls of Mary and Elizabeth.  It was fun.  We did get rather behind by the end...some days are hard to fit a 5 minute devo and 10 minute craft but we managed to do one after almost every meal the last couple of days and finished with a cross on Christmas Eve.  

To decorate our tree, we also made a string of popcorn and cranberries.  In the beginning, the boys kept eating it, but now that it is good and stale, they leave it alone.  We made another batch of salt dough ornaments left over from our Sunday night program, too.  The kids made a few things in Sunday school that we put on the tree.

It was a beautiful tree and we've enjoyed it very much...and I've enjoyed letting the kids decorate it (and consequently undecorate it) as much as they've wanted.  It has been the perfect tree for this time of our lives.  :)