Boo!

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


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

Happy Halloween!

What he's not doing

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

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

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

O is for Owen

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

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

Puddle! Puddle!

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

Behind the scenes of the bloglet

The milk joke

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

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

Word cloud

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

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

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

Imagination

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

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

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

Nap time!

How not to spend your summer vacation

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

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

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