Long time, no see!

Wow! I can't believe it's been over a month since I've posted anything. Time has flown for sure. We had a delightful Christmas though it required lots of traveling here, there and everywhere. We especially enjoyed the simplicity of our extended family Christmas celebrations--no big gift exchange just simply enjoying conversation and fellowship with each other. It brought me MUCH joy to see Caleb pick up where he left off with cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. He thoroughly enjoyed interacting with them which made his mom and dad very happy!

We are enjoying our little boys more than ever. Everyday I'm pretty sure they are cuter and smarter and funnier. Caleb has turned into a little pretender. Elliott has revealed that he wants to be heard--he'll "jabber" and make noises loudly while he's playing in his bouncy seat. I would summarize them both as delightful these days!

So what's new with each of them?

Caleb is loving to pretend--he likes to play pizza delivery with mom (funny thing, too, because I'm pretty sure we've never had pizza delivered to our house!) He likes to play doctor--he pretends he's his friend Tali and I'm the doctor. He will tell me he fell of and bonked his head--"Wike Humpty Dumpty!" He is still in love with his farm toys. He pretends each room of our house is a different field, the living room is beans, the toy room is wheat, the family room is corn. He will drive the combines all over the room "picking" the crop and then drive his tractor and wagon next to it to empty the hopper into the wagon. When he is all done, he'll drive his machines into the canvas box where we store them (their "shed") and say "Doodnight Combine! Doodnight tractor 'n green John Deere wagon!" My favorite pretend scenario was this one from last week:
"Mommy, may I Taywub peese hab that buck buck (bucket)?"
Sure Caleb, here you go.
"Fanks Mommy.....in case I pit (spit) up."
Runs into the other room, grabs a block, pretends it's an onion and pretends to eat it. Then he fake pukes in the bucket and runs to the bathroom and dumps it in the toilet and flushes while yelling:
"Taywub pit up. Fush down pah-dee. Bye bye pit up."
Then he literally just dropped the bucket on the floor and kept on playing with his toys like it never happened. Meanwhile I was in the kitchen rolling on the floor with laughter at how funny it was!

He has been healthy for a few weeks now--we had one crazy high fever after Christmas but nothing since then and it is so nice to see my little man's personality as it is instead of masked by the yuckiness of high fevers and how awful it makes him feel. Praise the Lord for a healthy few weeks! We do have to go see a specialist tomorrow to get something checked out that he's had since birth. I'll update more on that tomorrow after the appointment.

Caleb is SO hilarious. Everyday he says new phrases or words that I've never heard him say that make him sound so grown up. For example, "Oh doodness. My Taywub's i-peem-poem (ice cream cone) fall off. Oh bumma!" {That was a pretend situation as well.}

Or there was the situation when he decided to pretend my cell phone was a boat in a cup of water. OOPS! As I was lamenting to him that my phone was broken and oh no what are we going to do he says, "Mommy, go to store and buy new phone." I said, "Caleb, we can't just go to the store and buy a new one, phones cost money and we don't have that much money to just buy a new one." He replies after a brief moment of pondering, "Mommy go to store. Hab Taywub's piggy bank. Use Taywub's peemees (pennies) buy new phone." I have no idea how he even got the concept of money--we've never even told him that his pennies could buy things at the store. What a generous boy! By the way, he didn't get in trouble for that incident. He had no idea that dunking it in water would cause it to break and I was the one who let him hold my phone in the first place.

Caleb's newest achievement is putting together puzzles. My mom sent a puzzle for him the mail a couple of weeks ago. I kind of scoffed when I saw it thinking, "Caleb is HORRIBLE at puzzles." We have many puzzles and it seriously makes me want to pull my hair out when I do them with him because he has NO concept of how to place the pieces or move them slightly. He just didn't ever get them. Sure he can do peg puzzles but jigsaw puzzles (even the ones that say for 18 months) that have 4 pieces--he cannot get. But I showed him the puzzle anyway. I knew he'd like it because it had construction equipment on it. He did! And let me just say that he became instantly obsessed with it. It took 2 or 3 times of me helping him put it together and he could do it. Now he can do it completely by himself in like 30 seconds. This morning I got out the old puzzles and he did awesome at those as well. Here are some pictures of him doing his new one:


(P.S. I am in love with these wooden jigsaw puzzles--they were just what he needed to figure it out! They are sturdy and really helped him get the concept easier than the cardboard thin ones. I highly recommend them!)

Now for my Mr. Elliott. He is so delightful. He giggles and laughs at anything, nothing, and some strange things--Daddy coughing, Mommy making her lips pop, Caleb doing anything. He is ALMOST rolling over but not quite. He is quickly learning to sit unassisted. He grabs at anything you put in front of him and puts it immediately to his mouth. He is working on a tooth. He is figuring out how to use his left thumb as a soother. He would rather stand in your lap then sit in it. He looks like a baby bird because he always has his mouth wide open--either to smile or to try and get something in his mouth. He still is not sleeping through the night after an agonizing week of letting him cry it out with absolutely no progress. He still wants that 3:30 feeding, much to his mother's dismay. With our pediatrician's advice in mind (she originally told us to give it a try but then said if it wasn't working after a week that we should not force it), we are waiting another month or two until we try that again and hopefully we won't have to. Hopefully he will do it on his own. Here's hoping...

He is SO tiny! He was 13 lbs 15 oz at his 4 month check up--25% for all you numbers folk. We about peed our pants when we heard that stat. Caleb has never been below 75% for anything in his entire life--and the 75% was a rarity. He is usually riding on the 90-95% mark. So Elliott is just a teeny tiny babe. As a matter of fact, on Thursday of last week he wore without a problem the outfit that Caleb wore home from the hospital at 2 days old. Hilarious!

He still loves his daytime naps during and falls asleep so easy. The routine is that I bring him upstairs, swaddle him up (with one arm out!), give him his pacifier, sing him a verse or two of a song and put him down. The whole process takes about 3 minutes. When I put him down he is drowsy but sometimes (even after only a verse) he will already have his eyes shut. It's like I couldn't have laid him down awake if I tried. Anyway, it's such a joy to put him down for a nap--no fighting involved! He's like his momma--he'll take any opportunity he can to catch some winks! Did you know when I was little I would tell my parents that it was time for me to go to bed and ask them to please come tuck me in in a few minutes--no lie! This week he has started waking up from naps super early so I'm having to let him cry it out in the middle of naps but I'm thankful that he doesn't cry at the start of them. Praise the Lord for that extreme kindness!

Here are a few pictures of or littlest man:

(he's trying to suck his thumb in this one!)

And for the finale, here is a shot of the both of them taken right before Christmas: