Fixations

Caleb loves to put things "away". His idea of where things go does not exactly match up with Mom's or Dad's, however. We've had several funny stories over the past few months dealing with finding things that Caleb has hidden from us that I thought I would share a few. One night we couldn't find Matt's cell phone. (Caleb loves to get ahold of our cell phones if he can find a way to get them. He often calls people if we forget to lock our phones, so if you have been one of the lucky ones, know that Caleb loves you!) We used my cell phone to call Matt's number over and over again to try to find where Matt's was located. After 20 minutes of searching, we finally located the light ringing sound coming from inside the refrigerator.

A couple of weekends ago Matt and I were heading to the Houston Temple. I had Caleb loaded up in the car, and we were all ready to go when Matt announced that he couldn't find his wallet which has his recommend inside. He said that he had given it to Caleb to distract Caleb from trying to grab his cell phone when Matt was talking on the phone. So we started the hunt and looked in all of Caleb's "favorite" places. After 30 minutes of searching and then deciding to say a prayer, we immediately found it behind the laundry basket in our bathroom closet. We had looked in the laundry basket, but not behind it. It was actually one of those faith-promoting experiences about prayer.

After watching Caleb "put things away" in the trash can several times in a row, I finally decided to keep the trash can on top of the washing machine. It's very annoying, but it beats digging through the trash each trash day to make sure Caleb didn't throw away anything valuable when my back was turned.

Just this morning I was over at my sister's house helping her locate Dallin's pacifier and some parts of a toy that Caleb had so lovingly helped her put away. We found both of them....the pacifier was in an empty box along with some glue sticks that she had been missing, and the toy parts were hidden in a little crevice between her speaker and entertainment center.

This fixation of putting things away is actually hereditary. He gets it from my dad who is constantly putting things "away", or rather, out-of-sight so that my mom has to go on the hunt looking for things quite a bit.

Another of Caleb's favorite hiding spots: drawers.

An additional fixation of Caleb's is toilet paper. He mostly just loves to rip it apart although he does the occasional taste test too. We have become very good about closing all bathroom doors for the last few months because of this. (Previoiusly we just had to keep the lid of the toilet seat down so that Caleb wouldn't put things "away" in the toilet.) About a month ago, Caleb found a door that I had left open on accident. We were both down stairs: Caleb was playing with toys and I was folding laundry. He started to go up the stairs. He is very good about both climbing up and down the stairs without any trouble. He's only ever fallen a few steps twice when he was first learning. I followed him up the stairs where he took off to go play, and then I went back downstairs, loaded up the folded laundry in the laundry basket, then followed him upstairs to play with him. In that amount of time, this is the mischief that Caleb got into...



We love this little guy!!!