He's a pitcher!

It's great to see little Cade's brain in action. He's always learning and putting things together. It's really pretty amazing to witness (and often funny).

Last week Cade was getting ready for bed and I put some PJ's on him that have pitchers, catchers, and batters on them. As we put them on I'd point at a player on the PJ's and he'd tell me if it was a pitcher, catcher, or batter. Before bed he wanted to jump on the bed. (I know a real good dad wouldn't let him, but he was having so much fun and there are enough nights that I'm on the road and don't get to see him.) At one point he kind of lost his balance and caught himself with his leg up in the air for balance like in the picture below. He looked down at himself and exclaimed with glee, "He's a pitcher!" Neither Susie or I could breathe we were laughing so hard, but it was cool to see him translate an image he saw in a picture on his PJ's to real life in a spatial situation.

I was trying to get him to pose for more pictures and asked him for a big cheesy smile. This is what I got. Sometimes he just doesn't want to have a camera in his face, and other times, well... you make up your own mind here.

After a number of rounds of "He's a pitcher!" he started getting the arm involved. That's when the game became more serious as he started watching his limbs to make sure they were positioned just so. It's ok buddy, we have years ahead of us to work on your mechanics. For now we'll just work on arm strength, so just focus on throwing it as hard as you can (knowing I'll regret telling him that while I clean up the remains of something breakable in the future).

Water!

The theme of this post is....water! Cade has definitely taken to water this summer. This isn't a surprise to us, though. He's (almost) always loved his bath time, he's always loved the pool, and he enjoyed his first trip out on a boat earlier this year. But this last week Cade has taken it to a new level!

First, though, I wanted to just get a picture up real quick that we took a couple weekends ago. (It does have to do with water, just of the frozen variety.) We went down to the local rink and took Cade skating for the first time. He really liked it and did pretty well. He did a great job of staying on his feet and moving around a little bit, sometimes even without the help of the plastic crates.

We spent last weekend with our church down at Kentucky Lake. It was a great time of getting away to focus on building relationships with other people in the church as well as spend time together as a family. We had over 220 come for the weekend! We are blessed with a great community at our church. On Saturday we went out on the lake with another family. Here's a picture of Cade with a little buddy of his named Taylor. Cade had a good time hanging out with her this last weekend.

While we were out on the boat Cade got to take his first ride on a tube! He really seemed to like it for a while. After a little bit, though, he got tired of the water spashing up in his face and he wanted to get back in the boat. I don't think there is much that this kid is scared of, which I guess is a good thing and can possibly be a bad thing at the same time. But he sure loves being out on the water.

When we got back to Owensboro this afternoon, one of the local pools was holding their annual dog day so we packed up Chili and headed over there. Since Chili is now seven years old he can't really keep up with the younger doggies in the races (he did win the doggie paddle race a couple years when we first moved here). :) But he did shimmy enough to wow the judges and win the best shake contest.

In other news, Cade is now officially swimming on his own! He wears this little floaty vest, and until today he hadn't quite developed his sense of body control. He'd usually pitch forward or back or roll and get his face in the water if we let him go. But today he kept pushing me away when I was holding him and then proceeded to figure out how to move around and stay floating upright on his own (and pretty quickly actually). So we spent around two hours swimming around the pool chasing Chili and the tennis ball. Then he decided he was going to do some jumping in. In the past he liked jumping to me or Susie, but we didn't let him go under too much. But today he'd just jump in, bob back up, clear the water out of his eyes, and swim around just fine. It was super awesome to see him develop these abilities. It made playing with him in the water that much more fun.

Here's a short video of Cade swimming to me. I didn't realize I looked that excited when we were swimming around, but apparently I was the dorky dad. I don't care. It was too cool to have my own kid swimming around the pool with me today!