Fall 2010

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!

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!

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!

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

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

July, 2010

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!

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...

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

Zoe's first 4 months

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

Hard at work

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!

I'd like to buy a vowel

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

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

How big are the Orglets?

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!

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

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

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!