Church Clothes

This is what Caleb wore to church a couple weeks ago. Every time he walked into the room where I was that day (because he likes wearing his church clothes all day), I couldn't help but think he looked so stinkin' cute. It's those days that he gets away with murder, because he's just too cute. Fortunately, he dresses himself almost every day beside Sunday, and his outfit choices often leave me wondering why we own some of his clothes (or rather, why some of his super short shorts are still in his drawer), so he doesn't get away with murder most days.



If you tell Caleb to go get dressed when he knows we're going to church, he'll get upset, saying no, he has to wear his church clothes. Because getting dressed doesn't mean put on church clothes, only normal clothes.

Bed Hog

Ignore the fact that he looks like he's choking himself, because he wasn't...


Every night/morning, Caleb eventually ends up in bed with me. If he comes to bed sometime in the middle of the night, he often sleeps like Mommy likes to: horizontally across the bed. If he comes to bed sometime in the early morning, he likes to snuggle up as close as possible to me so that I can't roll over without either squashing him or falling off the bed.

A Picture of Me

Though I don't know why you'd want one, other than because it was taken by Caleb.

Taking Another Bite

Because Caleb loves his sandwiches so, I wanted to document it. I took a few photos and was satisfied with the results. But Caleb wasn't. With each bite, he kept telling me to take another picture. Then there was a moment that he tried to give me his "angry face" but it was so funny that I started cracking up, and then he was cracking up too. So even though I posted the best smiling ones already, here are a few more that I love.

Throwing out toys

It’s just Caleb and me these days, living in a big new house, with nobody but each other for company, entertainment, or conversation. We have more space to live in than we’ve ever had before, but no matter where I go in the house, Caleb's there too.

Sometimes we need a break from one another. No, that’s not true. Caleb never seems to need a break from me. I love being his best friend. I love how much he needs me. But sometimes, I need to be alone. And when those times come, I often tell him to go play with his toys for a while. After all, in our new house, he has a whole room just for his toys and another room to sleep in. He has so many toys, most of which have been in storage for over a year and he hasn’t played with them in so long, they might as well all be brand new toys.

But he never wants to. Not if it means Mommy isn’t going to sit in his playroom with him. Not if it means being separated from one another, even for a few minutes.

The other day, I desperately needed a break and told him to go play. He left my room for a few minutes, but kept coming back, no matter how many times I told him to go play. Finally, in desperation, I threatened to throw all his toys away if he wasn’t going to play with them.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve threatened to throw away his toys. The few times I’ve done it before, he gave in and went and played. But this time was different. He just did not want to play by himself.

“Let’s throw them away,” he agreed.

So frustrated, I went and grabbed a trash bag and started throwing away toys. I filled an entire bag full of toys.

“Are you going to play with your toys now or do I need to throw more away?”

“Throw more away,” he answered.

A second bag. Then a third. By this point, I was dumping entire baskets of toys into the trash bags, not caring what toys were getting thrown out.

Caleb walked over to me holding his Buzz Lightyear, one of the few toys he actually plays with.

“Should we throw Buzz away?” he asked.

That was the breaking point for me. He's such a sweet and loving boy. He didn’t understand at all what was going on, but he was trying to do what he thought I wanted so that I would be happy again.

I carried the three garbage bags out to the garage and put them in the back of Daddy’s truck, telling Caleb that we were going to drive them out to the dump to throw them away later. Really, I just couldn’t bear the thought of throwing away all his toys.

The next day, I brought the bags back inside. Caleb was so excited, hoping that he got to keep his toys. We sat down together and I explained how sad it made me that he would rather throw all his toys away than play with them and that together we were going to go through them and decide which toys to keep and which to give away.

As I held up each toy for him to decide, there were hardly any that he wanted to keep. So easily, he kept saying, “Let’s give that away.” We ended up keeping a lot more toys than he said to keep, just because Mommy was too attached to let them all go. In the end, we filled up one trash bag full of toys to give away and one shopping bag full of toys to throw in the trash.

We drove to Goodwill with the bag of toys. I unbuckled him from his carseat once we got there and had him get out of the car. I handed him the big bag of toys and had him give it to the lady who was working at the donation drop-off spot.

Afterward, I asked him how he felt. He told me he was sad, but I’m still not sure he really understood what happened. I think it was harder for me to give his toys away than it was for Caleb.

An Ear for Music

So Caleb and I are in my bedroom, pretending to clean, but we've been on a break for a while now. And while we're not actually cleaning, we're listening to music on my computer. I've got iTunes open and it's randomly shuffling through one of the folders. Most of it is Taylor Swift and the Jonas Brothers. There's also some Demi Lovato and Nick Jonas' solo cd mixed in there too.

Caleb gets up to go to the bathroom and a new song comes on. Caleb calls out from the bathroom, "Hey, is that Hannah Montana?" Why yes, yes it is. The one Hannah Montana song I have on my computer. I was impressed he knew who it was, especially since we haven't had television since moving to our new house at the end of April and hence have had no Hannah Montana in our life since then and weren't watching that much of the show the few months before that either.

So yeah, we listen to some pretty stellar music around here.

Peanut Butta

This boy LOVES peanut butter and honey sandwiches. Would gladly eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Usually asks for them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and then I have to try to convince him to eat something else for at least one or two of those meals.

Tonight's Sunset

Tonight, Caleb and I happened to be out in the backyard at sunset and noticed how pretty the sky looked. (Photo really does not do it justice, sorry.)


I went in and grabbed my camera to take a picture of the sky. Then Caleb jumped up on the big rock in our backyard and I tried to take his picture but he jumped back down again. I told him I wanted to take his picture. He said I was supposed to take a picture of the sky. So I told him I already did take a picture of the sky and now I wanted to take a picture of him on the rock. Being the angel that he is, he climbed back up on the rock and let me take his picture even though he was not in the mood. He even smiled for me. Such a good kid.



In other news, since I've been terrible at posting pictures on this blog as of late, look how calm Caleb's hair is these days. I think it's a mixture of the heat and the fact that he's addicted to showering. He wakes me up asking if he can take a shower. He showers by himself whatever days I'm not showering or if I'm just not awake enough to shower with him. We go through a lot more shampoo this way, but he really enjoys it and I figure I should encourage him in his daily showering habit. Plus that means anywhere from ten to thirty minutes that I can have to myself, which is a real luxury these days. We've also starting combing his hair after he showers, so maybe that's the trick to the less crazy hair these days.

And another random tidbit of Calebness - he thinks his eyes are green. He tells me I have brown eyes, Daddy has blue eyes and Caleb has green eyes. Sometimes I'll correct him, but usually that just starts an argument where he keeps insisting that his eyes are green. And it's hard for me to really argue that they're blue, because they've always been more gray than blue, so... There are times, however, that he'll correct himself and remember that he has blue eyes.

Oh, one more. The shirt he's wearing, he calls it his "ghost shirt" and loves to wear it. One random day, he asked me for his ghost shirt and I had no idea what he was talking about because he doesn't have any shirts with ghosts on them that I know of (maybe an old Halloween shirt, but all the Halloween clothes are elsewhere since they are all long sleeved). So I went through his drawer trying to convince him that one of the shirts in the drawer was a ghost shirt. When I pulled out this cave one that used to be his cousin Jackson's, I pointed at the little stick figure man and said he could be a ghost since he's making a funny face. Which was apparently good enough logic for Caleb because the shirt has since been dubbed the ghost shirt and he asks to wear it even when it's in the dirty laundry (but I say no). Yesterday he saw me folding it (having cleaned the laundry) and wanted to put it on, but it was an hour till bedtime so I convinced him to wait till today to wear it since then he could wear it all day long instead of just one hour. I was surprised when after his shower this morning, he remembered he wanted to wear his ghost shirt and went digging through his drawer looking for it.