Happy 2009!

Hope you're celebrating New Year's Eve in style!

Happy Boxing Day!

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. We did - lots of food, friends, and family. Owen is a big fan of Christmas, as it turns out. You might think he'd be a fan of the toys, but mostly it's because he loves CHRISTMAS LIGHTS and JINGLE BELLS. He says goodbye to the Christmas lights whenever we leave the house, and I think we'll be singing Jingle Bells until St. Patrick's Day.

Owen's first haircut

It's been a few weeks now, but I thought you should all know that Owen got his first real haircut. His beautiful curls were getting, well, less beautiful, with the growing length and especially the dry winter weather. I found myself longing for the humid summer air to come back and make his curls all bouncy again (proof that motherhood makes you selfless). We put it off as long as we could because trying to imagine the logistics of cutting all that hair off of a squirmy toddler with scissors near his eyes was pretty scary. In the end we took him to a pro - and I'm glad I didn't try it at home! It was a surprisingly emotional experience. I confess that I ran around him trying to catch the curls in an envelope as they fell (proof that motherhood makes you crazy).

From austin

The magic ner

Owen is fascinated by things that move, flash lights, or make sounds. Wheels (or fans or anything that goes "round and round"), cell phones, Christmas lights, and computers (which he calls "ners") are some of his favorite things. And of course, because he's almost two, "favorite things" are things that you'd better be sure he doesn't catch sight of unless you are prepared for him to claim ownership of them. Given that we use all of these things frequently, keeping them out of his reach is sometimes a lost cause. So, we try to find ways to teach him to use them non-destructively.

We have had some success of late in instilling in Owen a proper respect for ners. He has always been fascinated by ners, because we spend so much time at them, they often have pictures of him on the screens, and his grandparents appear to live inside them. But he knows about the buttons, and loves to bang away at the keyboard. He has actually taught us a few keyboard shortcuts we had been previously unaware of. But how to make him stop banging away indiscriminately? A few days ago it occurred to me that we could combine his love of computers with his love of letters pretty easily. So I opened up a blank Word document, hit caps lock and made the font huge, and decided to try an experiment. "Owen, can you hit the 'O' button?" And he did! So I pointed to the screen and showed him the O that he made appear. He was amazed. "OK, now can you hit the 'W' button?" And he did - and then looked up really fast to see the W on the screen, and looked at me with complete wonder. We continued with the E, and by then he was ecstatic, yelling "yay, screen! yay, screen!" I had to point out the "N" for him, but he still hit it himself. On his first attempt at typing his name, this is exactly what came out:

O W E , N N N

not bad, huh? And now he is so impressed by the magical screen that he's much more gentle with the keyboard.

Burrito! Burrito!

Owen still hasn't quite mastered the art of eating with utensils - but he eats burritos like a California native. The first time we gave him a taste of ours he got so excited that we let him keep eating - and he ate nearly the whole thing. Now he cries ITO! ITO! as soon as he gets a glimpse of that foil wrapper. He can't lift a whole one, so he has to bend over to eat until it's light enough to lift. Once we made the mistake of taking him with us to the burrito place down the street and getting the burritos to go. As soon as we walked out the door he threw a tantrum. He doesn't like to wait for his burrito.

I understand his obsession. I love burritos a little too enthusiastically myself. When I was pregnant with Owen (and hungry ALL THE TIME) I craved burritos so badly I nearly had some sent to me from San Francisco. And come to think of it, I've never liked to get my burritos to go. It's frustrating and a little sad to walk along holding a burrito when you could be eating it. So maybe it's in his genes. Don't worry about his diet, though. He has two parents, so he inherited a variety of tastes. Burritos AND sausages!

Just photos...

... just because.

It's that time of year again

We took Owen to play in the beautiful fall leaves and he had so much fun. It's hard to believe it's been a whole year since we did that the first time. So much has changed, and yet so much has stayed the same. For instance, he's still wearing the same jacket... only it fits a little bit differently now!

Yes we did!

Some of you might remember that back in May we took Owen to see Obama give Wesleyan's commencement address. At the time, Mike joked that someday, we would talk Owen's ear off about the time we took him to see Barack Obama, who was the Democratic nominee for president back in 2008 (but Democrats never win). Now we'll talk his ear off about taking him to see President Obama.

Yes we did.
Yes we did.
OK, got that out of our systems.
Now we return to your regularly scheduled baby blog.

Owen does GOTV

We went to vote as a family this morning. And even though I'm the only member of the family that can actually vote, we all did our part. Mike looked after Owen. Owen advised me on who to vote for - "OMAMA!" There was a line - the first I've ever seen at my polling place. And Owen felt the need to have a temper tantrum because he couldn't stay on the school play yard. But with a snack and some patience, we persevered. If Owen can do it, so can you. STFIL! (Stay The F* In Line, as they say.)

Boo!

For Halloween Owen and I dressed up as scary monsters, you betcha!


(That's Elmo and Sarah Palin in case you can't tell...)

Happy Halloween!

What he's not doing

I've recently realized that I tend to focus here on the bloglet on things that Owen does that we find interesting or striking in some way. But especially after my last post about how he's learning his letters, I don't want you to get the wrong idea. There are plenty of ways in which he's not so terribly advanced. We got a questionnaire to fill out for his daycare, to give them an indication of whether there are any developmental areas (communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, or personal-social) that he might need to work on. And he's doing just fine. But each category has a list of questions and it's funny - sometimes really funny - how difficult some of the skills are for him, compared to others.

For example, for fine motor skills, they ask whether he can stack a small block on top of another, a skill which he mastered about 6 months ago and quit doing once he got to towers of seven blocks, again, months ago. But then in that same category, they ask "Does your child get a spoon into his mouth right side up so that the food usually doesn't spill?" Now, I love him dearly, but are you kidding me? Where do I start? How about a fork. Let's start with a fork. Can he get food onto a fork? No. If I put it onto a fork for him, does he put it in his mouth? No. If I put it into his mouth, can he get it off the fork with his lips, tongue, or teeth? Sometimes. Does it then go in his mouth? No. OK. So, a spoon? For dry food, a spoon is only more difficult, because of the gravity problem. For foods like yogurt, a spoon would be better, but if you give him one, he just dangles the spoon in it, dipping it in and out. It doesn't help that he doesn't much like yogurt. But I'm not about to test him on soup!

Problem solving. "Does your child drop several small toys into a container, such as a bowl or box?" Yes. He can also use a shape sorting toy to put nine different shapes in a box through their own holes. He can name most of the shapes as he does it. So, great, right? 100% for problem solving? Not so fast. "After a Cheerio is dropped into a small, clear bottle, does your child turn the bottle upside down to dump out the Cheerio? (Do not show him how.)" Yeah, sure he'll do that, right? Nope. We tried. He got his hand stuck in the bottle. So we got a smaller bottle. He got his hand even more stuck. We closed off part of the opening. He couldn't fit his hand inside. He cried.

O is for Owen

A few months ago Owen became fascinated by printed words and letters. Given his name, perhaps it's no surprise that his favorite letter is O. On the wall of his room are a few things that say "Owen," and we sometimes point out the letters to him and explain that they are a way of saying "your name, Owen." So he started pointing out the letter O everywhere he saw it. We spent most of the summer saying, "yes, that's an O," when he'd stop to point it out on the pages of books, street signs, and manhole covers. He's pretty good with W's and E's, too. Next he became fascinated with the word "Exit" because there's an Exit sign by the window that they use to access the playground at school. And he now spends nearly as much time pointing at the words in his books as he does at the pictures, wanting to be told what they are (and wanting us to pull them off the page for him).

As is often the case in parenthood, our efforts to teach him about his name had unexpected consequences - triggering a love of letters, but not much understanding about his name. He clearly recognized it, but he had never said it. Then yesterday we asked him who was in the mirror, and he said, "Owen!" So we asked him, "What's your name?" and he said, "Owen!" with a big smile. It sounds like a cross between "own" and "Owen," and it makes us all smile to hear it. There's something really satisfying about watching him develop a sense of self.

Puddle! Puddle!

Granny and Grandpa came to visit last month, and we took Owen to Cape Cod for a little vacation. He absolutely loved the ocean. He ran straight for it yelling "Puddle! Puddle!" He was in heaven, between the largest puddle he'd ever seen and the largest sandbox he'd ever seen - right next to each other! He also had some special time with his Granny and Grandpa.

Behind the scenes of the bloglet

The milk joke

Baby sign language is popular for lots of reasons. Some parents do it because they think it will speed language acquisition, although the evidence for that is controversial. We did it because babies can control their hands long before they can coordinate the many muscle groups involved in speech. Frankly, it is a long 12 months before babies start talking at all, and even longer before they can be clearly understood, and waiting for Owen to be able to verbally communicate his desires would have been unnecessarily frustrating for all of us. An unexpected benefit of the handful of signs that we taught Owen is the window it's given us to his sense of humor.

Owen loves to play little games with us, and also loves to laugh. He has a hearty chuckle that tends to engulf him to the point of falling over. We're not always entirely sure what he finds so funny, but his laughter is contagious anyway. Owen's first joke, which he still loves, is what we call the "milk joke" - and no, it doesn't start with "So a baby walks into a bar..."! He often signs "milk" (squeezes his hand like he's milking a cow) while he's drinking his bottle. Once I grabbed his hand and signed milk with his tiny hand inside mine, Helen Keller/ Anne Sullivan style. He laughed and laughed. Now he does it all the time. He'll grab my hand and either stick his hand in my palm, or try to wrap his little fingers around my fist. We do the sign together and he laughs and says "milk! milk!" all while drinking and gurgling. It's the best.

Word cloud

Owen's current favorite activity is to point out anything and everything he recognizes in a book and tell us the name for it. This has led to many surprises. About half of the conversations around here these days take the form of "Did you know he says ostrich?" "No! Really? Oh, and he definitely says umbrella."

We've actually been keeping a not-very-complete list, and I've wanted a way to share it with you, but I do realize that it wouldn't make for very fascinating reading. Today, though, I got some inspiration. Here is an approximation of Owen's "word cloud":
(What is a word cloud? It's a graphic representation of words found in documents, or often websites, in which the size of the word corresponds to its frequency. From Owen's, you can see that he says, for example, "giraffe" and "sausages" quite a lot.)

Oh, and today's newest word? Coincidentally enough, in both "Where is baby's belly button?" and "Good night, Boston," Owen pointed out the "clouds" for the first time.

Imagination

I've been posting infrequently lately only because we've been extraordinarily busy. It took us a while to catch up with life after our trip to Maine - we all ended up with that nasty little bug, and it was weeks before we felt like our normal, healthy selves again. At the same time, Mike and I have both done some professional traveling, requiring some extra work beforehand, and leaving just one parental unit looking after Owen for days at a time. Those molars are still coming in, believe it or not, so Owen's sleep has been disrupted too (although we're not complaining, as we know we've been blessed with a generally good sleeper). So it's been kind of a crazy summer so far!

Owen is nearly 18 months old now, and looks more and more like a little boy, and less like a baby, every day. At roughly half my height, and pushing 30 pounds, he's quite an armful. I trimmed his bangs (his first haircut) when we returned from Maine. He's wearing toddler clothes - the sizes correspond to years, and not months, and "onesies" have given way to T-shirts. And it's not just appearances; he's also acting more like a child than a baby in many ways. He pushes toy cars around the room, saying "vroom vroom". He clearly communicates his wants, whether verbally, with his now 100-word vocabulary, or by bringing us books to read to him, or grabbing our hands and putting them on his back if he wants to be patted, or hugging our knees and saying "oooooo" if he wants to be picked up (and of course exclaiming "down! down!" a few seconds later).

Probably the most exciting new development is the apparent emergence of an imaginary world inside his head. In real life, he's constantly trying to remove glasses from people's faces, but we have to be very strict about that so that Daddy doesn't go blind. Recently, Owen found a solution to this problem. He has a book with a character who wears glasses, and he reaches out and "grabs" them carefully with his fingers, pulling the imaginary glasses off the page. He rotates them in midair, and pretends to put them on his own face. It's amazing to watch. And last week when I was away at a meeting, we did a video chat on the computer. I gave Owen a big imaginary hug, and he gave me one back, laughing and exclaiming, "Mama! Mama!"

Nap time!

How not to spend your summer vacation

We went to a remote Maine island this week for a much looked-forward to vacation with Nana. At least, that was the plan. I try to keep things positive here on the bloglet, but I am human. A timeline of our week:

Saturday - depart at 7:30 am after late night packing, arrive on island 4:30 pm. exhausted. unpack.
Sunday - it's foggy and cold, but beautiful and relaxing. take pictures outside. owen says "teeth ow" - thanks to molars (4?) pushing their way through.
Monday - owen gets sick. fever hits and climbing fast.
Tuesday - finally a sunny day - but spend it completely stressed out, on phone figuring out logistics of medical care and medicine delivery to remote island. fever spiking regularly to 103. i know an ear infection when i see one. try unsuccessfully to convince doctor from home to call pharmacy on mainland to prescribe meds that could be delivered to us on ferry. owen gets conjunctivitis in afternoon (was prepared for this, as it's been going around the daycare. have eye medicine.)
Wednesday - owen wakes with green gunk from eyes and nose all over his sweet, hot, miserable face. try, again unsuccessfully, to convince doctor from home to call pharmacy on mainland to prescribe meds for ear infection that could be delivered to us on ferry. she instructs us to go to the mainland to see a doctor, but it's too late in the day to do that. maybe owen is getting better? pack up just in case.
Thursday - not better. say teary goodbye to nana, leave at 6 am for 6:45 ferry, but it is full - i have to plead medical emergency and have doctor call to get on the boat. getting a spot on return boat seems impossible. hightail it back home to see doctor at 2pm (rather than spend all day in the emergency room and then have to drive 6 hours home). doctor says it's an ear infection (no! really?), maybe two, and prescribes sacred antibiotics.
Friday - finally some relief from the fever. spend all day trying to get an exhausted owen to sleep, but it's july 4th in cambridge and cannons are fired outside our window every 20 minutes.
Saturday - owen is much better. still cranky (did i mention he's teething), but sleeping.
Sunday - and now i'm sick.

Fortunately, all the camera saw was this (flash movie):

Feeding frenzy

Owen loves to feed himself these days. Not surprisingly, dinner is usually followed immediately by a bath. Especially when he eats macaroni and beef with tomato sauce.

Summer solstice

Here we are, kicking off the summer by watching the sun set on the longest day of the year.

Many thanks to Leigh, photographer extraordinaire!

A baby human

Learning to walk and talk are big events in the life of 1+ year old, and most developmental checklists seem to focus on those areas. But it seems to me that there's another way in which Owen has been making huge strides recently, and it's also one that reflects his status as a baby human: tool use. At first we thought he was just really into personal grooming - he loves to brush his teeth and his hair, for example. But he also really gets a kick out of using spoons and bowls. And like all babies, he loves keys, cellphones and remote controls. It's obvious with some of these items why they might be appealing in their own right - sometimes the TiVo remote makes a great noise! - but babies don't just like them, they are obsessed with them.

Owen has discovered a new favorite object to be obsessed with - nail clippers. I'm lucky if I can clip one nail before he wrests them from my grasp. At first I never let him have them, because I was worried he'd cut himself. I eventually gave in after a particularly vigorous struggle, to watch what he would do. He very carefully touched them to each of his toes, one at a time. We started saying "click" each time he moved to a new toe and he laughed and laughed, looking at us with a look that said, "that's right, that's what I'm trying to do!" and now he says "click" while he does it. "Clipping" his toenails is something that absorbs him for several minutes, attracting all of his focus and bringing him great joy.

Suddenly it is clear to me that these obsessions are about more than personal grooming, fun gadgets, or imitating Mommy and Daddy. They're about Owen establishing himself as baby human, tool user.

... but enough about us!

When we started the bloglet, I really didn't think it would last very long. I thought you'd get bored with it; I thought I'd run out of things to say. But it's been over a year, and here we all still are. We're thrilled that it's given us a way to keep so many of you up to date about our adventures with Owen. But we want to know more about you. Do you have a blog? Send us the link (or post it to the comments), and we'll add it to the new linklets section on the right. (Even if you think we already know the link, please drop us a line and let us know it's OK to post it.)



Update: Of course it doesn't have to be a blog - any website or flickr account you're willing to share will do!

More! More!

Owen still uses some signs to communicate, which we taught him back before he could talk. His favorite one, depicted at warp speed in the animated picture, is "more". He now says it and signs it simultaneously, and is very careful to do it well, since it seems to be the most important concept in his life. With just a wave of the hands, and a sweet little sound "moa! moa!", he is able to get us to keep doing whatever it is that we're doing to make him happy. He almost always means more food, more singing, or more bubbles. His first two word combination was "more bubbles", followed quickly by "more milk" - which was interesting because he can't say milk, he can only sign it (squeezing his hand like he's milking a cow). Update: I slowed the animation due to popular demand... hope it's less frightening now!

O-O-O-Owen & O-O-Obama

More than a few of you have noted the conspicuous absence of political references here on the bloglet. Don't be fooled - we are just as obsessed as you would expect us to be with this exciting primary season. I've resisted all temptation to mention it until now, but alas, I have my limits. On Friday we learned that Barack Obama had agreed to step in and give Wesleyan University's commencement address since Teddy Kennedy was, sadly, not able to appear as scheduled. With us being huge Wesleyan fans, and huge Obama fans, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to spend this gorgeous Memorial Day Sunday on Andrus field. It was a day filled with beautiful memories of my own graduation (can it really have been 12 years ago?)...

the joy of watching Owen explore a campus that still feels like home...

and the thrill of seeing and hearing the next President of the United States.

...extra points for anyone who can name a faculty member (or count the undercover secret service agents) in the picture above!

Also check out a more official writeup here.

May showers

Those of you with an eye for these things might have noticed that I got a new camera, which means lots of new, higher quality photos of Owen. Soon I hope to be good enough at using it to be able to take fewer than 140 pictures of him splashing in a puddle before I'm confident that I got some good ones. For now, though, it's very useful that when he likes something, he enjoys doing it again and again and again!

Head, shoulders, knees and toes...

Owen has been learning his body parts. He loves the song "Head, shoulders, knees and toes," and would be happy if we sang it to him all day. I happened to have the camera in hand the very first time he did the motions himself, after some training from Daddy. If we sing very slowly, he can switch from his head to his toes by the end of the verse (leaving out the more advanced shoulders and knees, for now).

Where's the rhino?

We continue to marvel at the new words Owen acquires every day. It's interesting to see which words he picks and when he learns them. For example, he started saying "flower," "tower," and "shower" within a few days of each other. Perhaps that's not surprising since they sound so much alike, particularly when he says them (ower! ower!). But before he started talking, I would have expected language acquisition to reflect more what he understood rather than what he could say. Now, though, I think he understands almost everything, and is just waiting for the ability to make the right sounds.

The new-word bonanza got a jump start about a month or two ago, when Owen started pointing. I took the pictures of him with the rhino statues at the beginning of April, and I was so excited when I asked him "where is the rhino?" and he pointed at it. Now he points at everything, and often it's because he wants to know its name. A few nights ago we were reading a book before bedtime, and after we finished the book, he opened it back up, and turned the pages until he found a page with a window on it. He pointed at the window and looked at me quizzically. So I said, "that's a window." And he smiled, pointed at his bedroom window, and said for the first time, "didow! didow!"

g-i-r-a-f-f-e

Owen's most treasured possession is (are) his giraffe blanket(s). He has two, one at home and one at school, but shh! don't tell him that! Very early on we started holding it (them) with him during feedings, and putting it (them) in the crib with him for naps and bedtime, hoping he'd form an attachment to it that would comfort him and help him sleep. It worked. When we put him down at night, he will sometimes cry just for the seconds it takes him to find his giraffe, rotate it until its tail is in his mouth, and start sucking. It's actually more than just a suck. He likes to spit saliva into it first and then suck out the juice. It's pretty disgusting, as you can imagine. But he loves it and it helps him sleep, so we just try to wash it as often as we can and hope for the best. 

Recently Owen has started wanting to take the giraffe out of the crib with him, both at home and at daycare. It has coincided with an increased interest in snuggling in general - with his giraffe, his stuffed animals (especially "baa" the sheep, "beaaaaar" the bear, and "momo" the elmo doll at school), and with us. It has also given us a surprising insight into his spatial memory. If Owen leaves his giraffe behind to go play in another room, he remembers exactly where he has left it. He might not feel the need for his giraffe for half an hour or more, but when he does, he returns to the exact spot where he last saw it. Sometimes Mommy and Daddy are mean and move it (whether for purposes of straightening up or for experimentation), and he'll circle around with mounting distress. When he finds it, he presses it to his cheek and says "raff! raff!" under his breath, like it's a secret between the two of them.

While we're impressed with his spatial memory and love the uptick in snuggling, we're not quite sure how to handle the new giraffe addiction. We don't want it to interfere with his interacting with the world, or other children. And it is our failsafe secret weapon - the one thing that will comfort him when all else fails. If he gets used to having it around all the time, what will we use? And what if he loses it (them)?

Bubble!

Owen's vocabulary is exploding. He has added at least a word a day this past week. Sometimes the words are things we've taught him, and sometimes they seem to come out of nowhere. A partial, roughly chronological list:
down
cat
up
mama
dada
nana
uh-oh
yum
baa (sheep)
that
no
light
hat
hair
banana
tree
hello
bubble
more
cracker
button
bottle
apple

Apples and trees, revisited

So I was looking at the picture I posted of Owen standing under the rhinoceros statue outside the Biolabs building, and it occurred to me that there was something familiar about it. So I dug out the old baby photos, and what do you know. I still can't tell my baby from my husband! Beyond the striking physical resemblance (cover up all but the eyes and nose to get the full sense of it), there's really something amazing about the expression and the... spirit, that just shines through. And isn't it incredible how things like hairstyles and tilts of the head can be inherited?
From left to right: Megan, Owen, Michael.

Bye bye baby, hello toddler

As I've mentioned before, for months now Owen has been sort of walking, but lacking some key elements of the skill set, like being able to stop. Yesterday morning, though, I put him down in a standing position, and instead of immediately grabbing my leg or plopping down on his bottom, he stayed standing. After a moment of careful consideration, he took off and walked into the next room, as if he'd been doing it his whole life. He kept it up all day. This afternoon I went to pick him up at the daycare, and there he was, standing in the doorway, my little toddler. We met Daddy and the three of us went to get burritos. Once there, Owen wanted to get out of the stroller, so we let him out, and he walked straight to the door. We went outside and he proceeded to walk home. He walked almost the entire way by himself - a distance of nearly half a mile. He refused any assistance, and when we picked him up to give him a break, he struggled to escape, crying "down! down!"... Owen doesn't do things by half measures. It was marvelous - a perfect way to celebrate the first warm, sunny day of the year.