Spiritual Baby :)

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned how Caleb LOVES to read the bible. In fact, he often goes hunting for his bible and exclaims "Bible! Bible!" Well, Caleb also loves to pray!



AMEN! :)

In other updates, Caleb is learning SO many things! He says SO many words now and basically understands everything. The biggest advancement is that I can now have some real conversations with him! It's really nice to be able to chat about our days. For example, yesterday I asked him what he did at school. He said "Play Amber, Jessica Sand. Alex hugs. Play water." He also has a pretty good memory. My dad played him 3 songs on the harmonica while chatting on the webcam. Later that evening Caleb was pretending to play the harmonica. I asked him what songs Wai Gong played for him and he said (in the correct order too!) "Star" (doing the twinkle twinkle motion), "Baa Baa" (as in Baa baa black sheep), and "Itsy Bitsy" (doing the itsy bitsy spider motions). It's SO much fun! It's also nice because he says things like "mama, hug please!" putting his arms out (he does this also with "kiss!"). It's just so much fun! :)

Surprise Discoveries (counting & animals!)

Over the past week, we've stumbled upon some nice discoveries of things that Caleb can do.

Counting

A couple days ago, I discovered that Caleb can count from 1 to 10! Caleb has been able to read the numbers for a couple of months now, but we never really explicitly taught him how to count. But we were reading a book that had a lot of cats, and I asked him "How many cats are there?" and he pointed to each different cat, counting "One, two, three...." Gabe and I were shocked and pleased with this discovery. :) I think he was pretty pleased that we were pleased and so now he'll count from 1-10 if you ask him to. Here's a video of him doing so:

I added some subtitles in case you can't tell what numbers he's saying. Some of his numbers aren't that clear. He also sometimes gets stuck on "Seven," but he's gotten a lot better. (He used to say: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6....5, and then look confused. haha)

Animal Impressions

Caleb was looking through his Curious George book (Which he calls his "Monkey Book") and in it he saw a picture of a penguin. He pointed at it and said "mmmmm" (which is what he says when he wants me to tell him what it is). So I said "that's a penguin." Caleb then stood up and started trying to act like a penguin! We never ever taught him that, but when he walks around in his sleepsack, we usually say something like "you look like a little penguin!" so I guess he remembered that. Since Gabe was working late that day, I started to film it to show Gabe. When he stopped doing his penguin impression, I asked him to do a chicken impression (not sure what he'd do). Turns out, he does a pretty good Chicken impression. Later I found out that he'll also do a duck impression. For cats and dogs, he just makes the noise, he doens't really act like them, although he has crawled around barking/meeowing. :) Here's some videos I took that first day of his impressions:

(that one was when I first disovered his Chicken. Below is another video I shot shortly afterwards)

Bye Bye Home!

I also realize that I forgot to mention that we sold our place last month and so Caleb moved out of his first home. Here's some pics of our last minutes at the house (Caleb picked some more appples from our backyard before we left)

As we pulled away for the last time, Caleb waved and said "bye bye home." Since then, he actually does this a lot. For example, when we drive and he sees a "mama car" (prius), he'll say "bye bye mama car" as we leave. When he poops a bubble at Gymboree, he says "bye bye bubble." When he eats a blueberry (his new fav) he says "bye bye blue baby" (which is what he calls blueberries :P)

Anyway, hopefully we'll find a new better home soon! In the mean time, we're staying with Caleb's Nai Nai and Yie Yie (Grandma and Grandpa Tang). 

Camera

One thing mama had to say bye bye to is her trusty Camera. It broke :( So there will be a bit of a hiatus in Caleb pics and videos. I've been eyeing a new canon that they don't seem to have in stores (at least the ones I've looked at recently) so I'll probably have to order it. In the meantime, I have uploaded some new pics at Caleb's picasa site and some new Caleb videos on youtube. 

Some things I forgot to mention in my last update:

• "Mama car" & "Dada car"
  Caleb is really good at recognizing what belongs to me and what belongs to Gabe. For example, he'll see my keys and say "mama keys," find Gabe's keys and say "dada keys" (which is pretty good considering we have most of the same keys ;) ). He does this with many items, our laptops, our laptop bags, out toiletries, our clothes, and our cars. Caleb especially LOVES to spot "mama cars" (Silver Prius). Many many googlers drive prius' because Google gave a $5K rebate for their employees who purchased fuel efficient vehicles. So it's really funny because he comes to Google or every morning when I drive him into the Google daycare parking lot, he perks up and points to each car and exclaims "mama car!" I love it :)
  Oh yeah, he also likes to play with the mama car:

• "Mama hair" & "Dada hair"
  Along the same lines, Caleb recognizes my hair. Last month, Caleb found a long hair of mine on the floor and picked it up. The following conversation happened:
  Caleb: (holding a strand of my hair up) Mama hair!
  Gabe: Yeah! That's right. That's a mama hair. Where's Caleb's hair?
  Caleb smiled, touched his hair
  Caleb: (pointing to the hair on top of his head) Baby Hair!
  (Caleb calls himself baby mots of the time unless we ask him specifically "what's your name?"...to which he replies "Ca-Luh!").
  Gabe: That's right! Caleb's hair. Where's daddy's hair?"
  Caleb smiled and picked up Gabe's pant leg and pointed at his leg hair. Hahaha. :)
  
• Doing house chores
  My mom is super mom (and now super Grandma). She not only takes care of Caleb, but always (despite my and Gabe's protests) cleans the house, cooks, and even makes friends with my neighbors. However one side affect of this is that Caleb now has a big interest in cooking and cleaning. He LOVES to wipe counters and floors, pretend to vacuum (and he also likes to pus the real vacuum), pretend to cook (and he often really insists on mixing whatever I'm cooking on the stove, etc). Here's some videos of Caleb "helping" with the house chores.
  
  
  
  
  
• Reading the bible
  Caleb received 2 children's bibles for Christmas last year (thanks Uncle Jonathan & Auntie Kimmy!). He's read though the whole Children's bible at least 3-4 times by now. I usually keep the bible a bit out of reach for him since the pages are regular pages and I'm afraid he'll rip it and because it's so heavy. But Caleb LOVES his bibles. He'll often walk over to the table I have the bible on and yell "bible! bible!" (now that he's quite the climber, he just climbs to get it himself, so I no longer keep it out of reach ;) ). He'll sit there and read story after story and point at the pictures, speaking words he recognizes like "circle," "sun," "moon," "ma" (Chinese for horse), "apple," etc. Here's a video of him reading his bible.
  
  
• Pretending to talk on the phone Caleb loves to pretend he's on the phone. He'll take anything - our cell phones, a calculator, his hand, even my hand ;) and pretend it's a phone. His favorite person to fake talk to on the phone is his Grandfather's, followed by his Grandmothers and teacher at Day care. He'll usually say something like "Hi Yie Yie, Hi Yie Yie!" or "Hi Wai Gong! Hi Wai Gong!" followed by a bunch of words that only Caleb can understand.

Other random tidbits:

• Spicy!
  Last weekend, Caleb took his parents to LA to celebrate the wedding of mama's high school (and college!) buddies Allison & Delwin. The reception was a Chinese style banquet. Caleb had already finished his dinner by the time the first dish came out. I was busy chatting with some old high school friends and Gabe served me some food. Caleb saw the jellyfish on my plate and was very excited. He started to take jellyfish off my plate and ate TONS of it. I watched him as he gobbled down lots of jellyfish, but figured it was ok. After a while, Caleb started getting whiny. He's usually very well mannered, so we were a little surprised. I thought he was just sick of sitting there for so long. He looked like he was trying to take something off his tongue. I was worried that he was allergic to the jellyfish so Gabe and I took him out of the banquet room. While outside, Caleb saw the escalator (one of his all time favorite things). He quickly forgot about whatever was bothering him and was excited to go up and down the escalator. After a while of that, we went back inside and he started to cry (very un-Caleb like!). I brought his milk out and we gave him some milk while on the escalator and he calmed down. Then he was ok. I figured he was just being fussy so I "lectured" him the way we do during his "bedtime chat" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sWI5jeZPoQ. By that time, he was his usual well-behaved self again. Then I started to eat the food on my plate and found out the Jellyfish was SPICY! (to be fair, Gabe said he didn't even notice the spiciness, but to me...whooo-eee! that's spicy!). I felt SO bad that I lectured Caleb when really his mouth was probably just on fire! But I'm also impressed that my little boy can take as much spiciness as he did! Here's some pics of him eating his spicy jellyfish.

Other new Caleb videos uploaded to Caleb's youtube page and more photos uploaded to his 21 month old picasa album.