BREAKING NEWS: mom's asleep. again.

Caleb really made my night last night.

He's in this stage where he's writing all the time--writing stories about me and Tam and Andrew and Madi and Tess and Hannah. Stories about all of us.

Well, sometimes he writes the stories based on ideas he comes up with--things that happened in the day--and sometimes he interviews us and writes something based on the findings of that interview.

Last night, I took him out to a baseball field and we played catch and practiced hitting. He had a great time and shortly after we got back home there was a paragraph story waiting for me to read.

It told all about how we played catch, just him and I, and how he hit the balls I pitched and how he learned so much about baseball and how, when it started to rain, we had to run to the car and hurry home to pick up the junk we left laying on the yard before it got ruined.

It wasn't so much a story as a chronicle of our day. But it was still nice to read--nice to read how I'm the "greatest dad in the world."

But while that was all very nice and very heartfelt and made me feel good, he actually made my night when he interviewed Tami for the story he was going to write about her.

She was laying on the couch, holding Hannah and I was working on the computer when he walked over to her.

"Mom, I'm gonna write a story about you . . . ."

"Oh, that's great, Caleb."

"Yeah, but first I got to figure out the things you like to do . . . ." He scratched his head and sat down on the floor by the couch. The pen flipped back and forth in his hand as he tapped it against his chin. His eyes rolled up toward the ceiling and you could tell, just by looking at him, that he was thinking . . . and thinking hard.

Finally, he stood up and said, "I know!" And the way he said it made it clear that he had spent a long while struggling to come up with something. But now he was excited--now he had something to work with.

He looked at Tami, his pen poised to record every word, and said, "I know what you love to do, mom. You love to lay on the couch a lot, don't you?"

Well, my head snapped up from the computer and Tami's head snapped up from the pillow it had been resting on.

"What? I like to what?" She asked, absently wiping away a thin string of sleepy-time drool that had been creeping down her chin.

"You like to lay around on the couch a lot--you know, resting, taking it easy. That's pretty much your favorite thing to do in the whole world, isn't it?" The boy was deadly serious. And that's what made the whole thing hilarious. He had no intention of embarrassing or teasing Tami. He was the consummate, un-biased reporter, digging for details and recording the hard, gritty truth.

Tami's mouth fell open and she looked around the room to see if I had heard (I had) and then she tried to convince Caleb that she had many other interests. But he wasn't buying it.

"No . . . " he said after weighing some of her quickly suggested likes and hobbies. "No, I think the thing you love best is laying around. That's what you do most. Now . . . how do I make up a story about that?"

Caleb wandered away scribbling in his notebook as Tami hollered all sorts of things at his back.

"I love taking care of babies! I love, um, cooking! I love . . . I love . . . oh, I don't know . . . I love . . ." She fell silent and I thought she gave up because Caleb wasn't listening. I looked over at her to say something witty, but she was laying on the couch with her mouth hanging open and her arm hanging limply toward the floor. A silvery string of sleepy-time drool descended casually from the corner of her mouth. I don't know if she was asleep or just really, really relaxed.