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