February 7 Young Cal

Wednesday:  It was another happy Wednesday at my house with little Cal. I find him such an intriguing person. He is full of surprises--always. He is very animated, and usually super happy. Kelly tells me that he gets really excited Wednesday mornings because he knows his grandma is picking him up at preschool later in the day. I'm glad he likes coming over!

One of Cal's favorite puppets is my alligator, Alfredo, who has a corresponding book that is very fun to play with! The alligator in our book, eats insects and other things down at the swamp. As you turn each page, you can make the alligator open and close his mouth: "Chomp, Chomp, Chomp!" Cal gets a real kick out of it. At the end of the story, our alligator is SO full of things he has eaten from the swamp (each page, he grows a little bit fatter) that he burps all of the stuff back out and becomes small again ... which cracks Cal up. I wish it was that easy to lose weight--one burp, and there goes 15 pounds!

Here is Cal demonstrating how wide he can open his darling mouth ...

And here he is actually feeding our Alfredo puppet with the fake food from my toy bins. Alfredo was stuffed with hot dogs, candy, tomatoes, etc. 

Alfredo's mouth opens and he has a built-in "stomach" that Velcros at the bottom so that you can retrieve the food you have fed him.

Here is Young Cal playing with our playground kids and horses too ...

He loves this kind of play. I remember Brendan played almost exactly like this at this age. I always loved to listen to the sound effects--Cal does all of them really well. He has a great imagination.

Cal's other two favorite puppets are "Sweetie Pie" (our much misunderstood shark) and "Rocky", our T-Rex. They are always in some kind of battle with each other or some of the other toys around here. In this picture, they are occupied with eating Matchbox cars.

One car for each ...

Cal regularly points out how BIG their teeth are and then he will roar like a giant Rocky T-Rex (since sharks cannot roar).

We played at my house until 3:30 and then drove back to their house to await the school bus. Cal likes to pretend he is driving my car while we wait. Sometimes he pretends my car is a motorcycle. Today, it was just a car. He pushes every button in sight on the console (I have removed the keys by this point).

You are such a doll, Callaghan!

Once the bus arrived and Erin and Aidan (and Brendan too) were all in the house, Cal and I came inside too. I had brought a bin of my paper airplanes for us to fly around since their house has nice high ceilings and wide open spaces. Cal is a very enthusiastic paper plane flyer. We threw so many paper airplanes, all over the place! 

I'm so glad you are so easy to entertain, Callaghan. You are a joy and I am so glad you are my grandson.