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!

First impressions

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.