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.