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