Caed's Getting Big

I just realized yesterday that I'm not very good at taking pictures or keeping track of Caed's milestones any more. He's getting big, fast ... in fact, Brad and I think he's grown and hit some big development milestones just within the past week, so I thought I'd try to take some random footage to share with you.


Other fun things that are not on the video include:

• He runs fast! "Fast," he says, as he moves his arms back and forth by his side.
• He counts to 15 pretty well with some assistance. About a month ago, he seemed to have a fear of walking down the stairs with us ... he always wanted to be carried. So, I decided to make a game of it, and we started to count as we went down the stairs. Can you guess how many stairs we have? If you said, 15, you're right. So now every time we go up and down the stairs, we count to 15 and when we hit that number, Caed exclaims "Woo hoo!" It's hilarious when we say 15 out of that context ... he stills says, "Woo hoo!"
• He uses his spoon and fork pretty well now. He'd rather pick up his banana and Cheerios with his hands, in the milk, during breakfast, but most other meals he does pretty well.
• He loves to be outside. He runs around with his wagon and gardening tools. He collects rocks and transfers them from the ground to the wagon to his car and so forth as he yells ROCK. He's a busy guy. He loves to visit our neighbors and help them garden too!
• Saying "hello" is a fun thing for him. He says hello, as many other folks do on our street, but he has definitely perfected the straight-armed wave that he sees so often from frequent passerbies.
• He LOVES Trader Joe's cinnamon alphabet cookies, and thankfully a love for the actually letters has developed as well. "B" is his favorite letter ... he even points it out on signs, but recently has come to like and recall other letters as well. Pretty impressive for a 20-month-old!
• Just this week, he's figured out how to use his frog puppet and say it's name too. We're trying to be careful how we teach him to enunciate this word because it seems to roll off his tongue as "foc" .... "FFFRRROOGGG" is what we're saying now to try to reinforce the correct pronunciation :).
  

Sharing Shoes & Other Fun Pictures

Caed's usually the one to try on daddy's shoes, but in a rare moment after dinner last week, Brad decided to try Caedmon's shoe on ... so cute! Caed thought it was very funny.

I decided to take Caed to the Museum of Natural Sciences last week to get out of the house and do something fun in the midst of the rain. With Caed's love for birds, he was right at home. While there weren't any real birds there, he still enjoyed pointing and looking at the stuffed ones. What a little enthusiast! The picture below is of Caed in a mock dinosaur footprint. He thought it was so neat to climb up into it and sit (not something he was suppose to do since there was a sign that read, "No climbing," just beside him.) In my mind, he was content and wasn't causing any damage, so it was fine by me :).

The next picture is of Caedmon and his favorite little, red friend -- Elmo. We're not sure how he came to like him so much ... he doesn't even watch TV for more than a minute or two at a time ... maybe it was the Elmo Manners book ... but either way, he's quite a fan. Grandma Helen and Grandpa got him the stuffed animal for Christmas and he's been sleeping with it ever since. One other thing to note about this picture is the excessive drool streaming from Caed's mouth. It seems like he's been teething for over a month now. Three canine teeth are coming in at once, but thankfully the pain hasn't been too terrible and Caed has been a great sport about it!

The last picture was taken after dinner one night when Brad thought it would be cute to have Caed try on his glasses. So cute! We have a similar picture from when he was 7 months old and another from about two weeks old ... my how he's grown!

Kangaroos & Blue Birds

If I haven't told you before now, Caed does quite a good kangaroo "jump" and is quite the bird enthusiast. Brad thinks he'll be the youngest member of the Audubon Society, thanks to GG's instruction. Take a look at the video and you'll see why!



If you're wondering about the kangaroo jump, it all started as we were reading Caed's Sesame Street alphabet book, and I was trying to explain what a kangaroo was. So, I showed him how it jumps and he seemed to think that was pretty fun. Now every time we talk about a kangaroo, he takes a big no-air-leap, thrusts his shoulders back, and laughs ... priceless!















I'll have to capture his hyena impression on video next ... it's great!

Visiting the Airport

My friend Erika had a great idea to go to the airport observation area today and let our boys watch the airplanes take off and land. It was a little chillier than we expected and the sun certainly didn't shine as bright as we had hoped, but we had a lot of fun ... and I'm sure the boys did too! We packed a lunch and enjoyed our morning/early afternoon with airplanes overhead and captivated little boys.

As soon as we arrived, Caed headed for the stairs of the observation deck, so that was our first stop. The wind was a bit brisk up there, but the boys got to see several planes take off and land right away. Caed has never been too interested in airplanes, but when face to face with them, he was quite intrigued. As each plane would begin to take off down the runway or come to a quick halt to land, he was pretty quick to stop what he was doing, look at the airplane and point. He does a good job at his beginning attempt to say airplane, and I'd like to give you an idea of what that sounds like, but putting it into letters right now would not due his attempt justice, so I'll just have to leave it at that .... Very cute, all the same! (Mason's word for airplane is pretty recognizable so hopefully Caed will catch on soon.)

The boys eventually made there way down the ramp and into the play area, where Mason immediately invited himself to play with another family's shovel and bucket set, and Caed attempted to climb the ladder to playground equipment that is much too advanced for him. Once he realized that he wasn't going to get too far with that attempt, he joined Mason in the sand and the boys carefully scooped sand into the bucket and actually played pretty nicely with the other little boys. They're growing up so quickly!

Our picnic lunch was pretty fun .... Mason ate in his stroller and Caed sat next to me on the picnic bench. For being one who enjoys walking around and eating, he did very well sitting next to me without a booster seat. (I just love it!) And we shared our lunch together ... thanks to Erika for making an extra sandwich for Caed! I made a complete lunch for both of us, in addition to the one that we were going to drop off for Brad, but Brad accidentally picked up our joint lunch instead of the one I made for him. We were left with 1 sandwich, a banana and a piece of pound cake. Brad on the other hand had his choice of a ham sandwich or PBJ cut up into 12 little pieces, a large bag of goldfish and thin slices of apple. But I guess that's better than the day that I had to give him Caed's lunch (intentionally) b/c we were out running errands and I realized that I forgot to make him lunch, so instead of heading back home to make him a lunch, I just dropped Caed's lunch off with him and put something different together for Caed later. (He was able to enjoy a PBJ, apple and alphabet cookies with his fellow staffers that day :).