Caspian is so awesome. Every day, he whips out a new word or concept. Last week he started praying at random times, on his own. He tells me he's going to pray, then what he's going to pray for. It's so cute. He does it every morning, too, when I'm getting ready in the bathroom. He'll climb up the stepstool, get a drink in a Dixie cup, announce "pray," set the cup on the top step, sit on the bottom step with his feet inside the stool, and pray for his water (and Grandpa, lately)! Oh, what a blessing he is!

He discovered money today! We were reading his toddler Bible, and his favorite pictures are from the prodigal son — especially where the son is holding a goblet in one hand and a bag of money in the other. I explained again that it was money and that you use it to buy things, and this time he repeated "money" (so cute, BTW). To show him some real money, I took all the change from my wallet and put it into his empty sock so he could hold it like the prodigal son held his bag. He thought that was the coolest thing ever. Then we dumped the change into a shallow tin and spent about 30 minutes sorting the different kinds of change back and forth between the lid and the tin. He said penny, quarter, dime, nickel, head, and house (building). We counted how many we had of each kind, put them in piles, poured them like water, and shuffled our fingers in them. Money is officially his new favorite toy (I know, I know — I've opened the floodgates). We played with it again tonight, and he keeps trying to get my wallet out to play with it some more. He would not accept poker chips as a substitute, either. Darn.


He got his second spanking ever this morning. :( He's been pulling out a power cord from the electrical socket in the living room recently, and the seriousness of it isn't getting through to him. This morning when he yanked it again, I gave him a swat on his behind. He was so shocked and surprised that he howled for quite a while. He didn't see that it was me, so he just associated the discomfort with touching the cord and the socket. (woo hoo!) We talked about it, and he decided that they were "No, no — eyes!" which means he's not allowed to touch them, just look with his eyes. Thumbs up!


I tried explaining about his birthday this morning, since we have a month to go. When I mentioned birthday, the immediate connection he made was "cake". I explained about his birthday cake, and asked what kind of cake he wanted (yellow and chocolate). Then I showed him the calendar, today's date, and his birthday. We circled his birthday with highlighters and pronounced it to be cake day. He understood that we had no cake today and that the special day was the day we will have cake, but all day, he wanted cake anyway! To get around the incongruity, he kept trying to circle today's date with the highlighters! He'd drag a chair over, climb up, grab a highlighter, and try to mark on today's square. It was pretty funny.

His big new color is teal and he's finally started verbalizing "orange" (as "ng"). Almost every morning, he asks to call Grandpa Kirk. His preferred greeting has switched to "Hi!" and when he starts in on giving "five," literally everyone in his sight line gets asked. He's getting pretty good at hitting balls with his plastic golf club (today we worked on a two-handed swing) — and he made the connection between that and Wii golf.

Marker session #2, with daddy: