I Stand Corrected

Caleb has never struggled with "finding his voice" as some would call it. He has been loud and proud to say what's on his mind since he began talking. Recently, he has taken to making known when someone is error. Typically, that person is me by default because I'm the fluently-speaking person he is around most often (Gideon is starting to tally up a little vocabulary though). You'd like some examples? I thought you'd never ask.


-After listing a wide range of baby animals and telling me what action he was imagining they were performing, Caleb seemed at a loss for ideas. I offered, "How 'bout a baby penguin?" He liked that, so I continued. "A baby penguin walking." Caleb looked at me with disapproval, slapped his hands straight down to his sides, wiggled his body side to side, then corrected me, "They waddle Mommy, penguins waddle, like this, not walk." 


-After I told Gideon that the large, plastic insect he was carrying around is a "bug," (a word Gideon can manage to repeat after me) Caleb says matter-of-factly, "That's a dragonfly." *sigh

-Right after bonking his brother on the head with a play-kitchen utensil, Caleb was placed in timeout. I explained to him his offense, "Caleb, you are in timeout because you hit your brother in the head with a spoon and that is not okay." Caleb, with head hung in feigned guilt, peered at me from under his eyebrows and chirped, "It's a ladle."  Touche. 


He also corrects others. During a play-date with some friends at the park, Caleb picked up a large, flat rock, held it to his ear, and spoke into it, presumably to an imaginary friend on the other end. My friend asked him, "Is that a phone, Caleb?" to which Caleb replied, "No, it's just a rock." 


And it doesn't stop there. He corrects our behavior as well. "Mommy, don't toss that, no throwing in the house!" or "You need to share" as Matt and I sit on the couch, playfully yanking the shared blanket back and forth. 

This kid is a trip! And I can't help but love him for it! 

Yes, those are his underwear on his head. This is the most recent,
decent, uploaded photo I have at the moment.

He's Got Jokes

Caleb was sitting on the toilet last night working on his...ahem...number two. He peered into the toilet at his waste and mentioned something about Piglet. Knowing he's a creative (see: weird) kid I asked him if he was telling me that his stool's shape reminded him of Piglet. He looked up at me and said, "That's not Piglet Mommy, it's Poo." Get it? Poo and Pooh, as in Winnie The. I laughed. Hard. Caleb seemed confused at my amusement so I venture to say the joke wasn't deliberate. It was funny nonetheless though. Here's hoping you laughed instead of puking. Sorry about the poop talk. 

Fibber McGee

As Caleb gets older, his creativity becomes more apparent. A while ago, I wrote about Caleb's attempt to outsource his clean-up task. Well, now he has taken to telling fibs. Last week, Caleb was sitting at the table with a bowl of dry cereal. Gideon was in his highchair eating his own portion of dry cereal. I look up to find Caleb with a tipped bowl of cereal, a naughty look on his face, and the unacceptable action of swiping all the cereal onto the floor. I demanded that he stop doing that and that he pick up the cereal immediately. He started to do so then refused then required a time-out for further convincing. After he served his time, I asked him what he did to get in time-out (the usual question he gets after an offense). He looks up at me wide-eyed and says, "The baby knocked it off the table." Gideon wasn't even in arm's reach of the table.

Yesterday, Caleb followed me into the kitchen. When he spotted a box of Band-Aids sitting on the counter he told me he needed one. I let him know that he did not. With that, he starts hopping up and down and convincingly fake-crying while yelling, "I need a Band-Aid. I have a boo-boo on my foot."

I thought children didn't start telling fibs until they were a bit older. While the act itself is not acceptable, there's a small part of me that's proud Caleb is able to formulate little stories. I've read that it's a sign of intelligence. Or perhaps it's a sign of future sociopathy. I choose to believe the former. Either way, the kid is stinkin' cute!

Outsourcing

Caleb becomes more and more clever as the days pass. Recently, he decided to outsource one of his tasks. He had just finished naughtily tossing bits of cheese all over the floor. My response of course was to tell him that this is unacceptable behavior and that his options were to either pick up the cheese or to have a time out. He dutifully got out of his chair and knelt down with me as I directed him to each cheese crumb and instructed that he pick it up and put it in the nearby bowl. After retrieving about three cheese bits and depositing them in the aforementioned bowl, he looks up and says, "Mommy do it," to which I tell him I will not be cleaning up his mess, that he must do it. During this exchange, Gideon has crawled his way over to us. Caleb looks up at me a second time, places a piece of cheese strategically in Gideon's path and says, "Baby eat it." While not the most compliant response to my directions, Caleb did derive two logical solutions to his predicament. I suppose I should be proud.

Early Sense of Humor

It amazes me how such a young child can have such a sense of humor. One of Caleb's favorite words among others such as baby and dog is hat. On top of saying the word frequently, he loves trying on all sorts of things as if they were hats. Recently, while eating his lunch, I was looking the other way when I hear Caleb say "hat?!"

He thought he was quite funny and admittedly I did too. I couldn't even put on the "serious mom" face to let him know that we shouldn't put food on our heads. He certainly keeps us laughing. :)