I Didn't Know How Much He Cares...

I guess being 3, Caleb still has no concept of being an adult one day. Tonight I asked him, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

He answered, as he has before, "A big kid!"

"Well," I said, "What do you want to be when you're bigger than a big kid?"

He thought for a moment and said, "A DADDY!...And I'm going to take care of Annalise!"

Caleb is Thankful!

Caleb and I made this turkey over the last month. I cut out the feathers and asked him what he was thankful for - he didn't understand what that meant, so I said, "What do you really really like?" or "Who do you really really like?", then I wrote his answer down and he drew a picture of it.

And what is Caleb thankful for? (in no particular order)

painting
Grandma (he didn't specify which one)
Daddy
Mommy
doughnuts
Thomas the Train
Grandpa (again, didn't say which one)
High 5 Magazine
mashed potatoes
volcanoes
alligators
taking showers
Annalise (I had to coax that one out)
Harold the Helicopter
fish
James the Train
lemonade
and Elmo

And we didn't have any more feathers today, but I'm pretty sure he's thankful that we brought out the Christmas tree today :)

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I am so not prepared for this!

Rereading A Christmas Carol

Well to jump start the Christmas season for myself, I re-read Dickens A Christmas Carol this week and enjoyed all the things about it that surprised me the first time I read it - that it is scary, that it seeks to convey a deeper meaning, that it has no carollers in it whatsoever.

Another thing about it, about everything Dickens really, is that the characters are suprisingly flat, most of them anyhow. It seems that Dickens characters, when they are bad, are exceptionally vile, and, when they are good, are righteousness personified. What is not flat is his use of metaphor, somehow he can make you feel as cold as Bob Cratchit and his single smoldering coal.

I struggle with is trying to imagine Scrooge and Bob and the ghosts as what they were intended to be, instead of Disney characters! I would like to see a modern retelling of the story to see how they portrayed, for example, the Ghost of Christmas Past, who is describle almost like a fiberoptic Christmas tree - glowing here and there, coming into and out of focus - and glowing on top like a candle.

So here are these 3 Ghosts (4 if you count Marley) and each one reflects his time - the past is youthful and reflective of summer, the future is a reaper suggesting death, and present, well he is a giant surrounded by piles of food, carrying a cornicopia as a torch. He is cheerful and pleasant, but he has two children - Want and Ignorance - who cling to his legs under his robe and who represent the less fortunate people for whom Scrooge has no patience and no pity. And for Dickens these children are the true scary part of the story:

"Beware of them both, and all of their degree but most of all beware this boy [Ignorance], for on his brow I see that written which is Doom"...
"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.
"Are there no prisons!" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

The spirit's retort has to be taken as a rebuke because this was Scrooge's excuse for not donating toward a charity at the beginning of the story. The conversation ends abruptly because the spirit's time ends and the Ghost of Christmas Future appears. Scrooges understand that at a sudden moment, it will be too late for him. He's already missed out on so much and has so little time to give.

I would think that a real life Scrooge would be depressed by seeing the life he could have had, but instead he is inspired and starts where he is. So that is interesting...and inspiring...just by itself.

A Few of My Favorite Things

This is my current favorite picture of Annalise:


November is my new favorite month - it used to be October but here, November is October, at least weatherwise, and since I have decided to just get used to being a Floridian, I am embracing November. The best thing about November is that the weather is so perfect, which it's pretty perfect December though April too, but November is the first hint of it and it just seems much more perfect after 6 months of super thick humidity and hurricane season. Plus it is full of preparation for the holidays, which I enjoy.

And my favorite mommy-activity is to check on my sleeping babes right before I go to bed. This is an activity that has not always been fun for me! When Caleb was Annalise's age, slipping silently into his room to gaze at his repose was the effective equivilant of stomping in singing at the top of my lungs and poking at him though the crib rails. The child was a light sleeper! But his sleep has changed and he now sleeps very deeply. Annalise sleeps much more deeply than he did at the same age, so I can go in and kiss Caleb and pat Annalise, or sometimes if she is in just the right position, I can even lower her crib rail (without waking her!) and kiss her as well. The funny thing is how often they are both sprawled in extremely similar positions in their sleep! It makes me wonder if the temperature has something to do with sleep position.

A few favorites that haven't changed recently?
- favorite chore - cooking dinner
- favorite Christmas cookie - chocolate peppermint pinwheels
- favorite thing to get in the mail - checks from RDS customers!

Wordless Wednesday

If You're Not Sure, Just Guess

Anyone want to take a stab at what Caleb's favorite color is?

A 2nd Self Portrait

Click here to compare. This time the line is eyes, the sticks are still feet, but you can see he's added hair. I am so proud! :)

Caleb Demonstrates How to Slice Mushrooms

I keep this kid busy to keep him out of mischief!






Two things - note the bright blue shirt he's wearing. He started the day off with a typical striped shirt, but I found a bag of 3T clothes that I had forgotten about and this one was in it. He was absolutely overjoyed to find this shirt and insisited I let him change into it immediately! All he needs is a name tag and he could be a Best Buy associate!

Also, Caleb is in a very intense "do it myself" stage. I'm not sure why, but instead of using "me" everytime "I" is approprite, he is much more likely to use "I" when "me" is the right word to say. So when he wants to do something without my help, he emphatically declares "I! I!!!"

5x7=35

Celebrating a beloved pet? Or an excuse to make a cake? You decide :)

Happy Birthday to Mako!
It's Mako's birthday and, can you believe this - he is FIVE! Can you guess what I made his cake to look like?

I'll give you a little hint...


All my kids :) Before Caleb was born, Mako was like a member of the family. When Caleb came along, he became "Our Dog". Now that Annalise is here, he is a hair making machine. But I still like the old pooch.


Caleb was more than happy to help Mako blow his candles out.

Oh and we didn't give Mako a piece of cake, since dogs aren't supposed to eat chocolate. I let him have some leftover waffles from this morning.

He also couldn't figure out how to get into his gift.

So Caleb assisted again. Things like this will really get dicey next year when Annalise isn't confined to a highchair!

Mako says, "Just what I wanted!"

Happy Birthday Mako! You're a good dog!

Updates & Sundries

I think we are making some real progress in the realm of potty training. Two things stand out to me in this:

1. Caleb has gotten to the point that if he has a meltdown, he doesn't also simultaneously wet his pants.

2. He had an accident a day or so ago and it upset him.

He is 100% cotton now, no pull-ups at any time. I hesitate to say that potty training was easier than I thought it would be, because it certainly took longer than I expect it to (we started in June), but all in all, I saw little bits of encouraging progress all along the way and feel sort of triumphant now that we seem to be in new territory.

Annalise has not cut a tooth since we got back from Ft. Myers. She has 5 teeth and no sign of evening things out.

Hopefully we will have a showing this afternoon. The last one was a dud, the people did not show up :( which really stunk because getting ready for a showing is very precarious for us. We clean like mad cutting it as close to the time of the showing as possible then keeping the kids and dog out until it's over. It certainly keeps me motivated to keep up with the Flylady, she has really made this a lot easier...and it's still pretty hard!

We visited a movie theater church this morning. I was explaining to Caleb what it was as we were parking and it made me think what a different world my children are growing up in compared to me. Meeting in an unconventional place doesn't bother me. The church I went to during college met in a lecture hall on campus.

It was a casual-dress church and a few weeks ago the pastor at our church went on a rant about that sort of thing - saying you should wear your best to church and describing the clothes of a young preacher. It was kind of funny because the clothes he described were nice clothes, not fancy, but modern nice. What was funnier was that he was wearing a nice suit too, only his was not modern, not to say it wasn't trendy, it just isn't trendy anymore.

I don't have a problem with dressing casually for church, the whole "man looks at the outward appearance, God looks at the heart" clears that up for me. But it sure it a sticky issue. I'd feel less awkward dressing-down for a dress-up church and dressing-up for a dress-down church!

So It's November...

Both of my kids did things that kind of amazed me this week.

Annalise has about 3 words that really mean what she is saying, but that doesn't stop her from communicating. I never dreamed a child could say so much with her eyes. So the other day, she was very curious about Caleb going to the bathroom and she gave me this look that just said, let me do this too! I humored her and pulled out the training potty, sat her on it and told her to go...and she did - immediately, like she really meant to.

Also, lately it has been extremely pleasant outside, we've had temps under 80 for over a week - that's a long time for us here especially this early in the dry season. Publix is about a mile and a half away, a distance I wouldn't dare walk outside in the summer because of the heat in the day time and the bugs as it gets dark. But I've taken the kids in the stroller a couple of times recently. Yesterday we went and as we left Publix, Caleb was playing around running along side me on the sidewalk, and he kept it up ALL THE WAY HOME - this child is about as tall as my legs are long, so he had to run to keep up with me and ran the whole mile and a half without stopping to rest.

By the way, we made the American flag craft on election day. I was trying to get him to make 50 dots for the stars, but he couldn't resist smearing one all over and said it was "a really BIG state!", so I guess that's either Alaska or Texas.

Our First Pomegranate

Because we had never tried one - and mostly because they were on sale - we had pomegranate for fruit snack time yesterday. The verdict is quite good, both Caleb and Annalise liked them a lot.

The part you eat is the little red berries or arils inside. They are shaped kind of like corn kernals, but are cranberry colored. Inside each aril is a tiny seed that you can eat or spit out like a watermelon seed. I read online that the seed is the source of fiber, so it's good to eat it.

The taste is sort of tangy, kind of sweet, but kind of sour. I think eating it with the seed probably takes developing a taste for, but neither of my kids minded it. The seed tastes kind of nutty, so it's sort of like eating fruit and nuts both at the same time.

To get into the pomegranate, I scored the sides, like you might an orange, submerged the whole thing into a big bowl of water and pulled the sides apart. The arils are trapped inside this white sort of spongy stuff that floats, whereas the arils sink. Gently rub the arils out, scoop off the white stuff and toss it, then drain the arils and eat them.

The BEST thing about it though is that other than scoring the sides of the pomegranate, I didn't have to cut anything into bite sized pieces! Plus they are coming into season now, while stone fruits are going out. Apples are really too crisp for Annalise's not having back teeth and cutting grapes into quarters is very tedious!

A Christmas-ish Story

A full year after Annalise was born, and I am just now feeling like I have regained enough brain cells to read something besides board books and Richard Scarry. I noticed a couple of weeks ago that I was wishing I had some Dickens to read! So I braved the library with both kids in tow and picked up a collection of short stories called Christmas Stories.

I flipped over to a story called "The Wreck of the Golden Mary", which didn't sound very Christmasy, but was being retold by the narrator at Christmastime, so perhaps that's how it fits in. It was a very engaging little story, but I guess at the end, Dickens got writers block, because the ending is sudden and inconclusive.

Regardless I found this interesting quote:

I have heard it broached that orders should be given in great new ships by electric telegraph. I admire machinery as much is any man, and am as thankful to it as any man can be for what it does for us. But it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true. Never try it for that. It will break down like a straw.

I just wonder what Dickens would think of the internet!

Calling Grandma