This is a crosspost from the blog I maintain for my son’s Owen’s webpage. Thought it was funny enough to post here.
In the past few days Owen has done at least one thing that really caught our attention and/or made us laugh. I thought I’d catalog the most recent three while they were still fresh in my mind;
1) Spoon – After dinner last night I took him out of his high chair to let him toddle off wherever he wanted to. He immediately climbed up onto one of our kitchen chairs and stood (no hands!) on it. In an effort to get him to get down I got a yogurt from the fridge and sat down in the living room telling him ‘If you want some you have to come over here’. He immediately climbed down but started heading over to his high chair, so he seemed distracted so I started eating the yogurt myself. A few moments later he toddled into the living room holding a spoon he had retrieved from by his chair and immediately reached over to insert it into the yogurt. Both Emily and I cracked up and I remember saying ‘Ok, he’s now officially surpassed the dogs in intelligence and abilities’.
2) Dog Bowl – This evening after dinner we went out on our back deck with the dogs. I stood guard near the top of the stairs so he couldn’t go down into the ‘dog yard’. While we were there Seeger drank out of the water bowl on the deck. Owen LOVES to play in this bowl, often to our chagrin as he gets his clothes wet, but hey he’s going to bed soon, even if he gets soaked it’s not that bad. He spent a while trying to put one of his push toys (the popper) in the bowl but after we made that clear we weren’t going to let that happen he gave up on that and went back to his normal water play. However, we weren’t prepared for him to lean over and push his whole face into the water to drink. Of course our dog Seeger had just done this very same thing a few minutes before that, so why not? That’s what you do with the bowl right? For those of you worried, Emily had just changed the water in the bowl so .. well.. it wasn’t THAT gross, and Owen seemed to realize that full facial submersion wasn’t a fun event, so he got up quickly and toddled over to dry his face on mom.
3) Clapping – As anyone who has met Owen in the past few weeks knows, he likes to clap. We encourage this by clapping with him and saying ‘Yay!’ whenever he initiates a clapping session. This sometimes goes on for minutes with pauses in between. Tonight Emily was having trouble getting him to sleep and had him in his crib. He was lying down and calm and our ‘Baby – Nighttime Ritual’ mix CD was playing in the background with various soothing/relaxing songs playing. One catch is some of these tracks on the CD are live, and thus after the song.. there is applause. Apparently Owen felt it necessary to stand up in the crib and clap along whenever he heard this applause, effectively ruining any progress towards sleep he had made during the song. So a new version of the CD will soon be mixed, sans applause. What’s next? Dancing? Karaoke? Only time will tell.
That’s all from the O-zone up here. We leave for NC in a few days. If anyone has any tips on flying with a 15 month old for the first time, we’re all ears.
-Emily, Matt & the O-Man