The Orglets' Bloglet

Happy Holidays!

2011-12-10T10:02:00.001-05:00

As we say in Portuguese, "Boas festas," from all of us, to all of you.

Photos by Wieland Brendel. More at http://www.wielandbrendel.de/gallery.php?gal=meganmichael. Thanks Wieland!

November 2011

2011-12-06T15:58:00.000-05:00

Music to our ears

2011-12-03T08:49:00.001-05:00

Owen's favorite activity these days is playing the piano. He started piano lessons with the new school year. It was very exciting for all of us to find a teacher willing to give lessons to a 4 year old. While we've definitely noticed that he's been spending more time at the piano since the lessons began, it's clear that he's not particularly interested in practicing the lessons that his teacher has in mind. However, he's very interested in teaching himself to play his favorite songs. In the video below, he is working on the theme song from Wallace and Gromit. (Note that Owen has never seen anyone play it, neither of us knows how to play it, we don't have sheet music for it, and he can't read music anyway. He's working it out entirely by ear.)

A portrait of the artist as a young man

2011-12-02T17:09:00.002-05:00

Happy Belated Halloween!

2011-12-02T17:06:00.000-05:00

Catching up... September 2011

2011-11-27T09:54:00.001-05:00

Catching up... August 2011

2011-11-27T09:51:00.001-05:00

Belgium, August 2011

2011-11-27T09:39:00.003-05:00

Catching up... July 2011

2011-11-27T09:33:00.001-05:00

Catching up... June 2011

2011-11-27T09:22:00.002-05:00

Catching up... May 2011

2011-10-22T09:26:00.000-04:00

Catching up... Owen, April 2011

2011-10-22T09:20:00.001-04:00

Catching up... Zoe, April 2011

2011-10-22T09:04:00.002-04:00

I am Owen

2011-05-01T08:51:00.006-04:00

I M OWEN

I M 4
I LIVE IN PORTUGAL

I LOVE TO PLAY THE PIANO

I ROTE THIS MY SELF

A few of her favorite things

2011-03-27T16:41:00.004-04:00

"Zoe has a strong personality," they tell us at her daycare. Needless to say, we are not strangers to strong personalities here in the Orglet household. Zoe seems to share a certain, shall we say, intensity, with her brother, and yet the objects of her affection are quite different.

Zoe loves giving kisses - especially to her brother during bath time. Zoe loves her piggy and her baby doll, both of which she has clearly named "Uh-oh!" for reasons we don't entirely understand. She loves to give them kisses, and to have them give kisses to each other. Zoe loves trains, and yells, "ooo! ooo!" (rhymes with "choo-choo," of course) whenever she sees one. When she plays with them, it generally involves giving them kisses.

Zoe loves food. She yells, "Tato! Tato!" whenever she sees a potato, orange, onion, or avocado, because they all fall into the category of "sort of round things that live in a bowl on the kitchen counter." She has noticed that we often blow on her food to cool it down. Now she blows on things to indicate her interest in eating them.

Zoe loves footwear, which she is now quite capable at removing and working hard on putting on by herself.

The recurring theme in Zoe's favorite activities is reciprocity. She absolutely adores giving us her favorite things (dolls, shoes, food, kisses), and then taking them back from us. Ad nauseam. This is accompanied by a constant refrain of "Da! Da!" ("give" in Portuguese).

Most of all, Zoe loves balls. If she sees one, she yells, with truly remarkable enthusiasm and volume, "BAAALL! BAAALL! BAAALL!" and doesn't stop until she has it in her possession. She hugs them, she kicks them, she drops them. Most of all, she loves rolling them back and forth with us, and taking them for walks.

That Orglet look

2011-03-06T23:50:00.003-05:00

It seems a week doesn't go by without someone declaring that Zoe is a "fotocópia" of Mike (and then asking me how to say fotocópia in English.) It's true that sometimes when I see her from a certain angle, Zoe looks just like Owen to me. And of course, people have always said that Owen resembles Mike. But I've been holding onto a glimmer of hope that some of my genes made it through this time...

Mike	Megan
Owen	Zoe

... no?

Owen's 4th Birthday

2011-02-20T14:00:00.004-05:00

Happy, Happy!

We are so proud of our little guy.

For Owen's birthday we planned ahead (relatively speaking) and bought cupcakes the night before for him to take to school. He got to have one for breakfast on the big day!

Zoe's 1st Birthday

2011-02-13T05:59:00.003-05:00

Zoe celebrated her first birthday on Friday! Her first year of life absolutely flew by. She spent an awful lot of it perched on my left hip while I went about the business of moving us to Portugal, but she seemed to be quite happy about it. She is a fun little thing, always ready for a big celebration or a big adventure.

For her birthday we gave her a baby doll, and she fell in love with it instantly.

Of course, she had to test it out a little first.

We also celebrated her birthday with a cupcake fest at the mall. (Yes, I realize I don't get full Mommy points for this, but not only is she a 2nd child, she also shares a birthday week with her big brother. We do what we can! And the cupcake fest was fun...)

A lazy Saturday morning

2011-02-05T12:11:00.004-05:00

You know how before you have kids, you imagine that having them might involve lazy weekend mornings snuggling together in bed? But then it turns out that it doesn't? Well, today it did! And it was nice.

What they're up to

2011-01-16T09:40:00.013-05:00

As we start a new year and the Orglets approach their birthdays, we find ourselves reflecting on their recent accomplishments.

Zoe has been very communicative lately. She is starting to make lots of noises that sound like talking. She seems to be saying Mama and Dada discriminately, and lots of other things that may or may not be words in English and/or Portuguese. She understands much of what we say to her. The other day when I was dressing her I asked her to give me her socks, and she did. When I showed obvious pleasure that she understood, it made her so happy that she reached for her shoes and gave those to me, too. Now whenever I dress her she spends the whole time trying to hand me footwear.

She loves it when we sing songs with her, and she makes requests by getting our attention and making the hand movements for particular favorites, while making sweet little sounds that are clearly her attempts at singing them. She also stands by the piano and dances and says "bap bap bap" when she wants us to play music.

Recently Zoe has been enjoying playing with her shape sorter. She's very good at the circle. The other shapes are harder, so she asks for help. She'll try once or twice, then turn to one of us, and give us the shape to put through for her.

Owen and Zoe have some things in common, like a passion for music, and wonderful senses of humor. But they are also quite different. Zoe is a dabbler while Owen tends to be incredibly focused. Owen is (and always has been) very independent, while Zoe seeks constant interaction. Zoe seems to enjoy making the people around her happy as much as Owen enjoys doing math and spelling puzzles on Daddy's phone.

Owen loves letters, number, and patterns of any kind. His independence, ability to focus, and love of music and patterns are put to nearly perfect use at the piano. He is absolutely determined to figure out how to play it. If we ask him to play a song with simple melody that he has never seen played before, he will more often than not be able to work it out. And then a few minutes later he'll play it in a different key. So far we have failed to find a teacher willing to teach piano to a 3 year old, so we have taken to playing simple pieces while he watches, which he then practices on his own. Like this:

(In the clip he's playing the left hand arpeggios and the right hand melody of an Allegretto by Czerny. They're not aligned in time the way the music suggests, but then he's figured it out entirely on his own, without being taught, and without the benefit of being able to read music. And, of course, he's 3.)

Happy New Year!

2011-01-06T10:22:00.003-05:00

Sometimes at night when we're putting Owen to bed he helps us tell him the story of his day. On New Year's Eve, I put Owen to bed and told him the story of his year. What a year it was! When 2010 started, he was only 2 years old, and he didn't have a sister. In 2010, Zoe was born, and Owen turned 3. His school in Boston moved into a new, renovated space, and his teachers changed. We packed up all of our things, and moved to a new house in Portugal. Owen started a new school, with new teachers and friends. He learned how to jump, play songs on the piano, read a little, and do a little math. As I went through all of this, he listened VERY carefully. He kept wanting to talk about the part where we packed up all of our things into boxes and put them on the truck. I think he might remember that for a very long time.

This is how we were in 2010:

It was a year full of family, friends, and adventure, and we will all remember it for a very long time.

Fall 2010

2010-12-08T17:36:00.004-05:00

The Orglets have been busy...
playing at the local playground

and at home.

We went back to PA for a week for a family wedding

... and merriment

and squeezed in some trick-or-treating

and doughnuts

... and merriment!

And then we came back home to Portugal, bought the largest turkey the checkout girl at the supermarket had ever seen (it was only 16 lbs), and squeezed it into our little European oven for Thanksgiving.

(For more photos of the Orglets, check out our smugmug galleries)

Alive and well in Portugal!

2010-10-16T15:04:00.002-04:00

The past month has been an absolute whirlwind. There is so much to say about our new lives in Portugal that I barely know how to begin. We are doing well. After about a month in our new house with no furniture, all 9,000 lbs of our stuff (or should I say, 4,082 kgs) were delivered a few weeks ago. We have unpacked most of the boxes. Going overnight from a 2-BR flat to a 4-story house with a garden has been overwhelming but also very welcome.

Zoe has continued to break new ground at an alarming pace. In the car on the way to the airport to fly here, I felt her very first teeth breaking through. She was a trooper, and after two or three days forgave me for making her suffer through jet lag and teething simultaneously. Also on the plane, she started waving. First, it was only for the flight attendant, but within a few days of arriving in Lisbon (after the teething and jet lag wore off), she was waving at everyone. All. The. Time. She is a happy little thing and tries her best to charm the pants off of everyone she meets. I think her first words will probably be the Portuguese for, "Oh, what a beautiful little doll," which she hears dozens of times a day.

Owen seems very happy here. He loves his new school. He is in the nursery year of an international school that goes from 3-18. It is in English which has eased his transition. We had our first parent-teacher conference this week and his teachers are great and love all the same things about him that we do. He is learning a lot - most notably, football/soccer skills, which judging from his rapid improvement must be an important part of the curriculum! He is enjoying having some outdoor space to play in, and he and Daddy have been very creative at inventing new games:

In general, Owen talks less about Boston than we expected him to - the exception being that he still includes some friends from his old school when listing his classmates. The other day, though, he said he wanted to go to "Boston home." When we explained that we had moved and that meant we weren't going back, he said he was sad about "losing Boston." All we could do was give him a big hug and admit that we were sad about it, too.

First day of school!

2010-09-06T06:04:00.003-04:00

Today was Owen's first day at his new school. He was very excited to meet his new friends. He doesn't even seem to mind wearing a uniform.

We are so proud of our big little boy!

On the move!

2010-09-03T14:00:00.000-04:00

What an exciting time. After several stops we have all arrived at our new home in Portugal. And, Zoe is crawling. On our very last morning in our old apartment, she took off on her first independent excursion. Where did she go? To see her big brother. She is still crawling on her tummy, commando-style, but she's working very hard at getting up on her hands and knees. Look out, world!

No words

2010-08-12T19:34:00.002-04:00

This is what Owen was typing on Mike's computer tonight while we ignored him and worked on moving stuff:

July, 2010

2010-07-28T13:12:00.004-04:00

Zoe is 5 months old and is... eating some solid food, sitting up on her own for long stretches before toppling over, rolling over both ways, trying really hard to get up on her hands and knees to crawl, blowing raspberries ALL the time, getting used to people that aren't her mommy, and always ready for a wet sloppy kiss.

In other news, our entire lives have been boxed, wrapped, and shipped to Portugal.

Owen seems to understand and enjoyed checking out the REALLY BIG moving truck.

We are camping out for a while.

Feed me, Mommy!

2010-07-15T19:16:00.006-04:00

Zoe seems to like chewing on a rice cereal-flavored spoon. She's done it two nights in a row now. She took to it immediately, with absolutely no drama. She just opens her mouth for a bite every time the spoon comes near her. So unlike her brother's first attempts! We're hoping that once she starts actually ingesting most of it, she will return to sleeping more than 3 hours at a time before waking for a feeding.

This week...

2010-07-11T20:32:00.005-04:00

Zoe found her feet:

and Owen taught himself to play Kumbaya on the piano.

When we were in England at Granny and Grandpa's we taught Owen to play Ode to Joy. He loved it, and started experimenting with chords. So Mike taught him a few intervals, like major and minor thirds. And Owen experimented some more. A few days later we were shocked to realize that he wasn't playing random notes... he was playing Kumbaya. He had figured it out by ear. We asked him if he was playing Kumbaya and he just beamed at us. Needless to say, we beamed right back at him.

Greetings from England

2010-07-03T17:56:00.003-04:00

Zoe's first 4 months

2010-06-13T12:53:00.004-04:00

A picture a month, always in the same chair...

Hard at work

2010-05-23T11:21:00.004-04:00

Zoe is working very hard at rolling over. She has gone front-to-back successfully a few times and is really working on back to front.

Her "piggies" and her newfound thumbsucking skills are helping her sleep through the night.

This keeps her generally happy.

Owen, the sweetest big brother in the world, is busy working on numbers - counting backwards from 100, counting by 10's, and addition are his favorite activities these days. So far he's limited in his addition to equations involving two addends, each less than five. So hard to be limited by biology.

Happy Mother's Day!

2010-05-08T19:47:00.002-04:00

I'd like to buy a vowel

2010-04-25T07:56:00.003-04:00

Letters are all the rage around here lately. Owen wants to know how to spell EVERYTHING. He can now read and type a few dozen words, and is working on sounding out new ones. Notably, he has quickly learned that vowels are almost completely unreliable in English, and when he tries to spell new words he often does so without any vowels at all. Sometimes he likes to leave out all but the first and last letters, like the other day when he told me (out of the blue) that "D R spells dinner," and then, "D S spells dinners."

Watching Owen learn to read and write provides remarkable insights into how his brain works. For example, he likes to write his name with crayons, and he is great at it. He's not showing a clear handedness yet, and will use both hands to write. But more than once, we've seen him write his name perfectly with his right hand, then put down the crayon, pick it back up with his left hand, and then write his name again - in equally perfect, mirror image.

One of my favorite motherhood moments happened about a month ago. I heard Owen call out from the back seat of the car, "O-P-E-N. It says OPEN," as we drove past a store that did, indeed, have an OPEN sign in the window. This was his first act of spontaneous reading, and I was about to congratulate him on his newfound skill when he added, "and N-E-P-O spells CLOSED." I ended up apologizing to him that the world wasn't as sensible as he was - and wishing that it were.

Zoe, not to be outdone, has recently started saying consonants. She spends a lot of time saying something that sounds like "Hi, cookie!"

Gross motor skills

2010-04-17T15:04:00.003-04:00

I'm constantly amazed at how proud I am of both Owen and Zoe when they do new things. My pride is continuously recalibrated to their level, whether they accomplish new feats ahead of, or even behind, "schedule." Lately both of them have been making great strides in their gross motor skills (not generally a forte in our family!)

Owen has been climbing like crazy at the playground:

and Zoe is getting really good at holding up her head:

Look out world, here come the Orglets!

Portraits of the Orglets as young children

2010-04-03T09:57:00.001-04:00

How big are the Orglets?

2010-03-30T17:03:00.003-04:00

So big!

Zoe was born a little smaller, but you can see she's catching up. And it looks like she's going for that Orglet head after all... though I'm glad she waited until after she was born!

Zoe go bragh!

2010-03-17T09:55:00.002-04:00

An advantage of having kids with birthdays so close together is that they can wear the same clothes at the same time of year. In this case, it's a special St. Patty's Day onesie from their cousin Molly. Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone!

1 month old

2010-03-16T11:13:00.003-04:00

The first month of Zoe's life went by so fast that I'm a few days late in marking it. She's a sweetheart, who loves to be held and suck on her mommy's finger. She is starting to show more and more of an interest in the world around her...

and even starting to smile occasionally!

An Orglet by any other name

2010-03-04T12:18:00.002-05:00

One of the most fun, but also most weighty, things about pregnancy is choosing your child’s name. We had a relatively easy time with Owen. We first decided to use my last name as a middle name for all of our children - it seemed to be a good way for us to share a name without having to bother with hyphenation. Then, we agreed to go with a first name that started with “O.” We flirted with a few other options before making the final decision, but Owen was always at the top of the list.

With Zoe it was more difficult. This time we wanted a better reason than “we just liked the way it sounded” when people asked us how we picked her name. We considered a few family names, but choosing just one person to be named after felt limiting, and we didn’t want her to have too many names! We also wanted something that was not too girly, and not too trendy, and didn’t end in “a” (this last so as to avoid the introduction of an “r” sound between first and last names – a potential problem for our half-English, half-American offspring). Once we came up with Zoe, we settled on it quickly. We liked the way it sounded and we liked what it meant – it’s Greek for “life.” The last step was to get Owen’s input. Having ruled out his preferred “hyphen,” we gave him the choice of Zoe or one other name, and he instantly smiled and said “Zoe” in the sweetest little voice. That was that - and here she is!

First impressions

2010-02-24T13:15:00.000-05:00

Before Zoe was born we really had no idea how Owen would react. It was hard to even tell how much he understood. When we took him on a hospital tour designed for older siblings a few weeks before she was born, he started yelling at the tour guide to "take the baby out NOW," but he also told everyone on the tour the story of getting a cast on his broken leg (the last time he saw a hospital bed, I guess), and cried "It's Owen!" when he saw the babies in the nursery (we must have overdone showing him pictures of himself when he was a newborn, swaddled in those hospital blankets).

When Nana brought Owen to the hospital to visit us and meet Zoe, it was clear he definitely understood. As soon as he saw Zoe in her bassinet he said, "it's baby Zoe!" Then we gave him an etch-a-sketch as a present for being a big brother and that was pretty much the end of his interest in Zoe.

Before the end of the night he did manage to "pat her gently" a few times. Surprisingly, her crying actually piqued his interest, and he came over to help Mike rock the bassinet to calm her down. Mercifully, it worked, and he beamed with something that looked a lot like brotherly love.

Since coming home he still hasn't shown much interest, but what interest he has shown has been positive. He really doesn't like it when she cries - "Don't want Zoe to be sad again!" he yells - but he does occasionally ask about her if she's not in plain sight and he smiles whenever anyone says her name. He was a little afraid of the boo-boo on her belly button, but then who can blame him? And though he doesn't want to interact with her much, he has also shown almost no signs of jealousy. All in all, we're counting it as a big win.

That Orglet look

2010-02-18T14:50:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking that Zoe looks a lot like Owen, but even I'm surprised by the remarkable resemblance upon direct comparison:

Zoe, left, Owen, right. Owen was 11 days old for his picture, Zoe just 5 for hers.

Happy 3rd Birthday, Owen!!!

2010-02-17T18:06:00.004-05:00

She's here!

2010-02-12T11:00:00.001-05:00

We're excited to announce that Zoe was born on Feb 11th, 2010 at 4:03pm. She weighed in at 7lbs 6oz and 20 inches, with a perfectly reasonably sized head. We're all doing well.

...or maybe John Hancock

2010-02-04T19:34:00.005-05:00

Sometimes progress is fast and furious. On Sunday I was really proud that Owen had scrawled his name on the back of an envelope in almost-recognizable, only slightly out-of-order letters (see last post). Just one day later at school the kids decorated their own placemats. Much to everyone's surprise, Owen wrote his name on his:

You can call him Picasso

2010-01-31T15:04:00.002-05:00

Drawing is one of Owen's favorite activities. Markers are his preferred medium. His style has undergone something of a transformation in the past year, as you might imagine. Last spring, when faced with an empty canvas, he would usually do one big scribble, and then one small one, and the result was often something like this:

In the summer and fall, he started to experiment with different textures and patterns, like "wiggly lines" and "raindrops":

Most recently, he has distinguished between "writing" and drawing. Here is a writing sample from a month or so ago:

In the past few weeks he has made dramatic progress. Both his drawings and his letters have become more recognizable. Today he drew some faces:

and then he wrote his name (he wrote the letters in the right temporal order, though didn't place them quite right so it reads OEWN plus a scribble):

The artist at work:

It (will be) a girl!

2010-01-23T16:10:00.000-05:00

This week, we finally got the news that Orglet #2 is a girl! We are excited for so many reasons.

We're also relieved that Owen won't have to be any more confused than he already is. We had been hoping to prepare Owen for the new baby by telling him that he was going to have a little brother or sister, once we found out the gender. Then we weren't able to find out for sure. So we tried telling him he was going to have a "little brother or sister," but that confused him. Then we tried to focus on the fact that he was going to be a big brother, but he would just correct us every time and say "or a big sister!" So we finally threw caution to the wind and told him he was going to have a little sister and be a big brother, even though we weren't completely sure. And he's been OK with that. In the past few weeks we started asking ourselves how we would explain it to Owen if we found out that Orglet #2 was actually a boy. We agreed that the easiest thing might be to just raise it as a girl... Owen can get very stuck in his ways.

How is Owen taking the baby news? Well, he seems excited, but it's hard to tell how much he understands. He talks a lot about the baby in mommy's belly. He likes to pat it and snuggle with it. He knows that some of the things in the house are for the baby. And he knows that in a few weeks we will go to the hospital to take the baby out. But when I asked him what would happen after we took it out, he said, "Then we'll put another one in." Which is definitely NOT the right answer!

Yesterday we asked him what we should name her and he said "a hyphen." He is a big fan of punctuation, so this is probably a good sign... though hyphens generally rank below semicolons and curly brackets, so all bets are still off.

Christmas photos

2010-01-09T15:41:00.008-05:00

"How pregnant are you?"

2010-01-05T23:24:00.002-05:00

These days, that's almost always the first thing out of anyone's mouth when they see me. There are several answers.

1. I'm pregnant. It's all or none. You can't be just a little bit pregnant.
2. I'm officially 34 weeks pregnant as of today.
3. I'm this pregnant (no, these aren't mugshots):
4. I'm due February 16th.
5. I have six weeks left to go.
6. Check the countdown to the right!

And how am I feeling? Pretty well, all in all. This pregnancy hasn't been dramatically different from my first, though I'd say if anything, it's been easier. The only unpleasant parts are heartburn, middle of the night leg cramps, and restless leg syndrome. All of those I had last time. There were a few other symptoms I had while pregnant with Owen that Orglet #2 has spared me - so far, at least. For one, I seem to have avoided the overwhelming stupidity that I experienced while pregnant with Owen. I was a complete airhead for months. Second, I remember lying awake at night (on my side, of course) with what I called "screaming hip pain" - presumably a result of my bones realigning themselves for delivery. Not even a twinge this time around. And last, but not least, for my 3rd trimester with Owen I was so tired all the time that I went to bed every night at 8:30 pm. And here it is 11 pm and I'm still awake! Party time!

2009, a retrospective

2010-01-02T14:11:00.002-05:00

Happy 2010, everyone! At this time last year I remember wondering what 2009 would bring. I knew it had the potential to be an unusually exciting year, because Mike and I were applying for new jobs that would probably require a move - but where to? Now, a year later, I can hardly believe everything that happened in 2009. So for those of you who have been wondering what we were up to all year (and rightly so, since the blog posts were few and far between), here goes:

Between February and August, we traveled to a combined 23 job interviews, to locations domestic and international. The trips averaged about 3 days each, which works out to one of us being away - and one of us being a single parent - for 3 out of every 9 days. Of course, during that time we were also both trying to keep things moving forward at our current jobs, prepare as much as possible for our interviews, and spend as much time as we could with Owen. I also spent a total of a month working on a collaboration in Philadelphia, and missing my boys terribly, in the late summer and fall.  

We had expected that the job interviewing and decision making would take a few months, probably ending in April or maybe May at the latest. We were really, really, wrong about that, as it went into September and the loose ends weren't even all tied up until November. But in the meantime, at the beginning of June, we found out we were pregnant! So exciting! We suddenly had an extra factor to consider as we made our decisions about where to move, and when. And although it's been a pretty easy pregnancy, it has definitely affected me physically - there's no escaping that extra person you're carrying around. And that wasn’t the only medical issue, including...  

Just as we thought we saw the light at the end of the tunnel after all the interviewing, Owen broke his leg at the end of August. He took it really well, and only had to have a cast for 3 weeks. But it was a long time before he made a full recovery - he had to wear a boot for 2 weeks, and limped for almost 2 months. At about 30 pounds and with a very strong will, carrying him around everywhere wasn't easy! Then once he recovered, it became clear that he was ready for potty training. He has done really well, but it didn't exactly happen overnight, so that's been another, shall we say, challenge, for the year.  

We never could have made it through 2009 without lots of help from grandparents. Nana, Granny and Grandpa all spent a lot of time with us, and with Owen, filling in for daycare vacations and lending their helping hands during those single-parenting bouts. Thank you!  

As we sit and look back on a challenging year, we couldn't be more excited about the end result. Now, looking forward to 2010, I'm not even trying to imagine what it will bring. I just know that by this time next year, our lives will be incredibly different from what they are now. We'll be a family of four, living in Portugal! How can we even dream of what it will be like?

The music man

2009-12-29T22:14:00.006-05:00

Let it snow

2009-12-20T20:56:00.009-05:00

Owen had a great time in the snow this afternoon. He and Daddy built a snowman together. First, they engaged in some parallel play:

Then, Owen decided to help Daddy:

One of Owen's major contributions was a "hat print." Initially he wanted to do a handprint, but when Mike saw Owen take off his glove, he told him it was too cold to take his gloves off. So Owen came up with the idea of doing a "glove print" instead. It was such a success that he was immediately inspired to do a "hat print" too!

Everyone was happy!

Close encounters of the Santa kind

2009-12-12T16:27:00.004-05:00

This is the first year Owen has been old enough to understand Christmas. Last year, he fell in love with Christmas lights and Christmas songs, but this year he understands a lot more. And he seems to be a big fan of the holiday. In fact, we can get Owen to do almost anything by telling him it's for Christmas. Like, going shopping at Target, or not screaming because the neighbors have a wreath on their door and we don't. Or, sitting on a strange man's lap and asking for "presents," as he did last weekend. He was very calm through the whole thing, and took it quite seriously - so seriously that I had to ask Santa to tickle him to get Owen to smile. Santa looked understandably hesitant but did it anyway, and it worked, as you can see!

Our beautiful boy

2009-11-10T02:36:00.006-05:00

Orglet Part 2: the sequel

2009-09-16T17:28:00.007-04:00

Yep, the Orglet's Bloglet is now the Orglets' Bloglet! How much change a simple apostrophe move can bring. Orglet #2 is due Feb. 16th, 2010 - just one day before Owen's 3rd birthday. All is going very well with mom and baby. We had our 18 week ultrasound this morning, and the doctor said the baby looks "awesome." And in case you're curious, they said Orglet #2 is "probably" an Orglette, but (s)he was feeling modest so we don't know for sure at this stage...

You got a match!

2009-09-03T20:34:00.004-04:00

Since Owen got his cast we've been spending more time inside doing quiet activities, like jigsaw puzzles. He loves jigsaw puzzles. He has improved very rapidly over the past few months, going from one piece "baby" puzzles to large floor puzzles with 20-30 pieces. It's fun to see the huge sense of accomplishment he gets from completing them. He often says, "you got a match!" when he sticks two pieces together. When he finishes the whole puzzle, he smiles and laughs and either says, "Good job Owen! You did it!" Or, "Well done Owen! You did it!" (depending on whether he's speaking American or English - he is, of course, bilingual). But the best is what happens when there's just one piece left - he goes completely berserk. Sometimes he gets so excited he rolls around the room, holding the last piece and laughing his head off so that he can't even put it in. I tried to take a video of it today, but this time the last piece reaction was very muted - you can see the sense of accomplishment at the end, though...

Catching up...

2009-08-31T21:29:00.004-04:00

You wouldn't know it from reading the blog lately but we've had quite an active summer around here. We've spent some nice time with friends and family and had a bunch of fun outings and trips, to local and even international locations. More on those in an upcoming post. For now, I want to share some pictures from the summer. Most of them are from my phone - the only camera I have with me most of the time! Special thanks to Grandpa and Jeff Kay for bringing real cameras with them...

Wait a minute, is that a cast? Yes, yes it is. In the final minutes of the summer daycare session last week, Owen fell at the playground and broke his leg. He barely cried, saying "You fell on the step. It was scary!" And so we thought he was more shaken up than hurt, until we realized he couldn't stand on it at all. He has had the cast for a week and a half now. Another week and a half to go, and then hopefully it will come off. He is taking it remarkably well. Occasionally he asks for the cast to be taken off, but he's almost as likely to ask to have a cast put on the other leg. He's not a fan of asymmetry.

Big splash

2009-07-19T14:42:00.011-04:00

Owen loves water. Puddles, sprinklers, fountains... everything but his bath. He calls fountains "big splashes" and he can't get enough of them. Now that we're finally having summer weather, we've been exploring some local fountains. Below is a movie of Owen "playing" in a fountain on the way home from school on Friday. It's typical Owen - he loves it, but appears somewhat scared of it, and periodically forgets that he can run into it and needs to be reminded. (Forgive my shrill, annoying voice and listen for his delightful squeals if you can.)

Bedtime for Bonzo

2009-06-29T21:03:00.003-04:00

They say you know that your toddler is ready to transition from a crib to a bed when he starts climbing out of the crib. Well, with Owen... not so much. He doesn't always want to go in it, but once he's there, he doesn't like to leave the crib, either. He hasn't shown any signs of seriously trying to escape. He has, however, perfected the art of using super-gravity to refuse to get up under any circumstances. For us, that was the sign that he needed a bed. We were hesitant to make the transition, though, out of fear that he'd be up wandering around all night.

Two weeks ago we went to Ikea, where he climbed into a bed and refused to leave it. So we bought it. The same bed, the same mattress, the same sheets - we didn't want to leave anything to chance. We set it up and let him spend a few days getting used to having it in his room. Then he started asking to be put in the bed, not the crib at night. The first few nights we listened outside his door and it was obvious that he was running around the room having a party, so we'd have to go in and put him in the crib for the night. Then yesterday at naptime, he stayed quiet, so we let him be. When it was time to wake him, we found him fast asleep. Not in the bed, but on the futon, with his head on the wooden armrest, his towels tucked behind him, and his little hand clutching his rocking chair.

He looked very sweet, but he was NOT happy about it when he woke up. Then last night he asked to get in the bed again. We had a long talk about how important it was to stay in the bed. And he did. I listened at the door, but far from having a party, he was singing quietly to himself. The song was his own creation, "Gentle, gentle, I love you," to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. This morning we went in and there he was, fast asleep on his big boy bed:

It's a big day.

Saturday in the park

2009-05-30T22:08:00.005-04:00

Piano man

2009-05-05T20:16:00.003-04:00

The Ray Charles jokes are just too obvious, so I won't even bother. (Did you think I didn't mean it when I said he was obsessed with sunglasses?)

Round and round

2009-04-16T19:31:00.006-04:00

There are girls Owen's age that try desperately to get his attention. An almost two year-old classmate of his, who clearly adores him, told him last week, "Owen, I think you are beautiful." But he doesn't really notice them. It's kind of sad to watch.

I just tell the parents of these poor girls, "It's not her fault she doesn't have wheels." Because if there were a girl with wheels, he would be smitten. Owen loves wheels. He has loved pushing things with wheels since before he could walk. One of his first "words" was "ra ra ra" for bus - as in, "the wheels on the bus go ra ra ra." For a while he would ride in his stroller with his head stuck out the side so he could watch the wheels go round.

Now that it's spring, Owen pushes his stroller home from daycare almost every day. This is not as straightforward as it might sound. For one, it's very hard for him to see where he's going. He has to stick his head around the side to do that, but that makes it hard to push it straight. So sometimes he just opts to push it blindly. This causes great amusement for people walking towards us. If he can't see them, they can't see him. About 50% of them laugh and remark that they thought the stroller was pushing itself.

The daycare is due East of our apartment - straight into the low sun in the morning and evening. Owen does not like direct sunlight. The bloglet regulars among you might note that his sunglass addiction could come in handy for this problem, and it does to some extent. He has now gotten the hang of wearing them right side up and leaving them on for a minute or two at a time. But then he has to stop to take them on and off a few times. You can watch him stop and think about how he's going to do that and push the stroller at the same time. His hands go back and forth from the glasses to the stroller. He tries one hand on each, then realizes he needs both hands to push the stroller. He puts the glasses on the ground, then pushes the stroller one step, and realizes that they're not coming with him. He picks them back up, then realizes that he doesn't have any hands left for the stroller. He repeats this several times and then eventually he gives up, puts them back on and walks some more.

Until the terrain under his feet changes from sidewalk to black top to red bricks, or sewer grating. Then he has to stop and announce the name of the new terrain. (No, he doesn't say sewer grating. He either names the shape of it, or calls out the letters on it.) Then he'll walk for a while, until we get to a bench, where he'll stop and yell, "Owen sit on the bench!" and climb up onto the bench to sit for a moment. And then, from time to time, if he sees a tree, he has to stop and hug it. I'm not kidding. He hugs trees.

He wears his sunglasses at night

2009-04-02T19:58:00.004-04:00

Owen absolutely loves sunglasses. He loves folding them and unfolding them, putting them on his face, under his chin, on his head. He loves telling you when you're wearing them (and then grabbing them off your face and playing with them himself). This has been going on for as long as I can remember - at least since last summer. It has been a challenge for him to learn to be gentle with sunglasses. He has destroyed several pairs of mine and of his own. It is heartbreaking to hear him cry "Mommy fix the broken glasses!"

At school they try really hard to not have any items that "belong" to one child or another, but they've basically made an exception for Owen and a particularly fetching pair of purple sunglasses with white dots. If the other children take them, everyone gets very tense until they hand them back over to Owen. Fortunately his friends seem to understand the importance of the purple glasses in Owen's life. All weekend he asks for the purple glasses and we talk about how he'll get to have them again when he goes back to school on Monday.

With spring and summer on the way (someday), I thought that perhaps I'd like to wear sunglasses again sometime soon, and for that to happen, Owen would have to become attached to a pair of his own. So I went online and picked out four pairs for him. He immediately fell in love with a green pair with colorful dots. Last night I let him go to sleep with them on (the things you never think you'll do before you have a 2-year old). Then, rather predictably, in the middle of the night I woke to him screaming at the top of his lungs "GREEN GLASSES! GREEN GLASSES!" because they had fallen on the floor. I didn't go in - I couldn't justify giving in to a 3 am cry for sunglasses, of all things - but I wanted to.

Portrait of a two-year old, Part II

2009-03-22T22:27:00.005-04:00

(We're still here, we're just insanely busy - taking turns traveling and interviewing, trying to get Owen to stop throwing his food. Good thing he's so cute!)

Portrait of a two-year old

2009-03-07T09:51:00.002-05:00

WMOM - all requests, all the time

2009-02-20T20:33:00.002-05:00

Owen has always loved to be sung to. Now he requests the songs he wants to hear by name. And he does it all. the. time. It is useful at night when I'm putting him to sleep. Instead of trying a dozen songs only to have him yell "no song!", now he just says "Sing Uff Magic Ragon song," or "Sing Hit the Road - Jack." Tonight he said "How about Jingle Bells?" and we sang it about a hundred times. It's not so much fun, after I've left the room, when he starts yelling "Moooommmyyyyyyy! Sing! Alleluiaaaaa!" (which is Owenspeak for "Michael row the boat ashore.") It is lots of fun in the morning, when he is generally in a good mood. This morning he asked me to "Sing E I E I O song!" So I sang Old MacDonald and let him fill in the animals. To my great surprise, it turns out that Old MacDonald has a farm filled with chickens, cows, pigs, and triangles!

Happy 2nd Birthday, Owen!

2009-02-17T00:01:00.003-05:00

Bravery

2009-01-28T15:54:00.005-05:00

Owen has been going to the "ear doctor" ever since his first ear infection when he was just 4 months old. Fortunately he doesn't get ear infections too often, but they still want to monitor him, since even between infections his ears don't clear properly. What this means is that every few months we go to 2 appointments, one with an audiologist and one with an ENT. And Owen hates it. He typically screams at the top of his lungs the entire time, from the moment we walk in the room (he recognizes it right away). He thrashes and refuses to stay still, and I have to hold him as tight as I can so the doctors can do everything they need to without puncturing his eardrums. It is extraordinarily exhausting, both physically and emotionally.

He had his most recent appointments on Monday. I tried to prepare him in advance by telling him we were going to see the doctor, and that the doctor was going to want to check his ears. When we got there this time, he took one look at the doctor and said "no doctor! no ears!" and clung to me and was about to cry. And then the most amazing thing happened. I held him and explained again that the doctor just wanted to put the telephone in his ear and see what Owen heard. And I lied a little bit, and said that maybe his grandparents would be on the phone. And then I watched him be so brave. He didn't protest. He didn't cry. He leaned in against me, his eyes big and his lips quivering, and sat quietly through multiple tests. By the end he even cooperated by pointing to various body parts when the doctor asked him to in quieter and quieter voices. Then later in the afternoon, we went back to the ENT, and he was scared again, and he was brave again. The whole experience was remarkable, not just for his cooperation, but for how clear it was that he was cooperating despite his obvious fear and uneasiness. He has self-control. He can be brave. He is growing up.

Oh, and his ears? Not great, but good enough for now. We'll go back in May for the next round of tests.

The balancing act

2009-01-25T20:21:00.003-05:00

Raised by a working mother myself, I know I’m not doing anything new in raising Owen while continuing my career. Until recently, I hadn’t even stopped to give it much thought. I had been warned that in trying to do it all, I might wind up feeling like both a bad scientist and a bad mother. But I’ve actually been quite satisfied, and it hasn’t been as hard as I feared. As I tell anyone who will listen, the two key things that make it doable are a fantastically supportive husband who is a great father, and convenient, high quality daycare. Add to the mix that Owen is a great sleeper (except for his recent tendency to forego naps) and that Harvard has some great new programs for working scientist moms (thank you, Larry Summers), and I really can’t complain.

But let’s be clear: it’s still a struggle. That convenient, high quality daycare is expensive, and we can’t actually afford it. Its hours are strict, so there’s no staying an extra 10 minutes in lab to finish an experiment. We have a few hours a day of time at home when Owen is asleep and we’re not, and those are filled quickly with work we weren’t able to finish during the day, not to mention household chores. And there is almost no time for errands. Even grocery shopping needs to be planned for – I can’t go on my own with Owen while Mike’s in the lab because there’s no way to transport the groceries from the car to the apartment without Owen running into the street. We used to love to watch movies, but we don’t get to go out to movies at all anymore, and we have been so busy that we even canceled our DVD subscription service for lack of use – and didn’t even miss it. I used to love to read books, but now I use my commute for catching up on email, and I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.

So, what’s so hard about it? Most of the time, as I’ve said before, being a working mom provides me with a sense of balance. But it is a delicate balance. Adding just one thing, like a snowstorm, or traveling, or one or more of us getting sick, can throw us off kilter for weeks. And trying to do what we’ve been doing lately – keeping our lab work moving forward while we apply for faculty positions in our spare time – is asking for trouble. The winter has been filled with snowstorms, illnesses, and extra work that seem to be conspiring against us. Most recently, Owen has been suffering a not-very-serious (thank goodness) but hard-to-shake stomach bug that kept him home from daycare almost all of last week. It sent us into crisis mode, because we both had important experiments to do, not to mention preparations for upcoming interviews. Thankfully Owen’s beloved Nana came and saved the day – caring for him so we could get some work done.

Then this morning, poor Nana came down with the bug. And Mike had to work all day. So my long list of things to do got put on hold (yet again). I never even had a chance to get out of my pajamas. But lucky me – I got to spend the entire day with Owen. We read books (“more Sam book!”), made artwork with crayons and stickers (“Mommy help please!”), rolled around on pillows and blankets on the floor (uncontrollable laughter), watched youtube videos (“more cows!” “more dinosaurs!” “more Barack Obama!”), and sang lots of songs (“more happy know it!”). At dinner, Owen ate two big bowls of applesauce all by himself with a spoon, for the first time –thanks to Nana’s teaching. And then I put him to bed, like I do almost every night, rocking him and singing to him and feeling the weight of his head and the wet warmth of his drool on my left shoulder. And that's what we working parents mean when we say "it's all worth it."

Maybe this time it will open?

2009-01-16T19:41:00.004-05:00

Owen has been working on a project lately. A little over a week ago, he took a set of keys and started poking it in the grating covering the hot water pipes in our hallway. He has since spent hours and hours testing every key on both of our key rings in just about every "keyhole" on it. When we bring him home from school, he starts saying "Owen want keys!" before we even get in the door. He doesn't even stop to take off his coat before he picks up where he left off. His patience is amazing. He just keeps trying and trying, and has yet to be put off by his lack of meaningful progress. Occasionally he'll say, "help please" or "open it," but only in a hopeful tone - never frustrated. I'm not sure whether he just enjoys doing it, or if he thinks there's a huge reward at the end, but either way, his diligence serves as a noble example of persistence in the face of a challenge!

Happy 2009!

2008-12-31T20:11:00.002-05:00

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

Happy Boxing Day!

2008-12-26T16:21:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-20T07:50:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-12T14:37:00.006-05:00

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!

2008-11-25T23:04:00.000-05:00

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...

2008-11-22T20:41:00.002-05:00

... just because.

It's that time of year again

2008-11-17T18:42:00.003-05:00

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!

2008-11-05T00:53:00.003-05:00

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

2008-11-04T09:49:00.008-05:00

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!

2008-10-31T19:23:00.005-04:00

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

2008-10-05T13:56:00.005-04:00

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

2008-09-28T11:40:00.003-04:00

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!

2008-09-20T15:07:00.007-04:00

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

2008-09-07T12:21:00.007-04:00

The milk joke

2008-08-28T23:33:00.000-04:00

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

2008-08-13T23:55:00.006-04:00

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

2008-08-02T12:37:00.008-04:00

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!

2008-07-19T16:22:00.001-04:00

How not to spend your summer vacation

2008-07-05T12:08:00.007-04:00

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

2008-06-27T23:00:00.002-04:00

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

2008-06-22T18:35:00.005-04:00

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

2008-06-16T20:11:00.000-04:00

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!

2008-06-06T23:19:00.002-04:00

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!

2008-05-31T13:50:00.011-04:00

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

2008-05-25T19:46:00.009-04:00

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

2008-05-18T21:15:00.001-04:00

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...

2008-05-11T00:26:00.005-04:00

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?

2008-05-08T23:20:00.003-04:00

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

2008-05-03T12:40:00.001-04:00

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!

2008-04-23T22:09:00.005-04:00

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