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Journal Key:

Green = Steve | George = navy | Janet = Purple | Evelyn = Black

1/6/11 (Thursday)

Owen was very happy to see me when I got home tonight. It was very nice. He was in a great mood. We got quite a few bits of real people food into him, and he had quite a bit of good tummy time in the living room. He does not crawl but he definitely can pivot like nobody's business. Then, for the first time ever and entirely through a fluke of timing, we decided to throw Owen and Cara into the same tub together. It seemed to work all right.

Owen also had a blast after his bath. Ev had to put him down on the floor in the bathroom for a moment to get Cara out of the tub. He scooted out from under his towel, which was a hoodie towel and so streamed out behind him. He found the bathroom cabinet and began banging it happily against the toilet, shrieking.

We had some extra late reading tonight--all from the Little House book, and well past Cara's bedtime. Adding up all the minutes spent reading this week got us to an impressive total of 174 minutes.

1/8/11 (Saturday)

Thanks to the reading contest for kindergarten, it's now ten minutes to ten and we just turned off the lights in Cara's room. Our exciting Saturday night: reading These Happy Golden Years for ninety minutes with our five-year-old. I can think of worse things to do!

1/9/11 (Sunday)

We're working on getting Owen eating more solid foods. Dinner tonight was very funny. He had a few pieces of asparagus, some rotelli, a piece of bread, and a baby granola bar that I'd bought because YBR asked for more snack food for him and I had figured I'd branch out. He picked up a piece of asparagus. He dropped it. He picked it up. He dropped it. Finally he decided to keep a hold on it, and he brought it to his mouth. Later I saw him essentially chase a piece of the granola bar off the side of the tray. Having accomplished that, he picked up some asparagus, got distracted by a toy, and dropped it while his hand was out over the other side of the tray. He rolled some pasta off, too. He worked on his bread, I know, and I'm pretty sure he ate some other things. It was an adventure, though.

Tomorrow we're going to finish These Happy Golden Years. Cara is very willing to marry Almanzo Wilder. If she can't, she's pretty anxious for Laura to get on with it. She's also very fond of the horses Barnum and Skip; there was a lot of gasping when Barnum walked for the first time. These books, I'm realizing, are really perfect for Cara. There's very little real conflict, and a lot of very nice things happen. I'll be sad when we're done. Perhaps, now that Cara's so fond of Almanzo, she'll be willing to listen to Farmer Boy, even though the main character's not a girl!

1/10/11 (Monday)

I learned today that one of the women at YBR has nicknamed Owen "Sir Pees-a-lot." Which is apparently what he does. He is not the only boy at YBR with this nickname.

Owen was given a lot of grown-up food tonight: bread, broccoli, and even some meat loaf on a spoon. He definitely ate some bread, and he seemed to accept the meat loaf. The broccoli he mostly mashed into his tray and himself, prompting a bath. It was a very splashy bath; Ev has been able to solo the baths, but tonight it required two people to bathe him, mostly because Owen was not interested in sitting.

He still needs to work on learning his name. But it's possible that he is starting to mimic us when we wave at him.

Thanks to the magic of our recently restored wireless internet connection and Netflix, Cara can now watch full-length Scooby-Doo films whenever she wants. Unless, of course, her cruel parents decide she needs to eat dinner at the dinner table.

Tonight, with lots of little squeals of glee from Cara, we finished These Happy Golden Years. It will be interesting to see what we read next.

1/11/11 (Tuesday)

Owen is making progress, even from just a week or two ago. Today when I picked him up, I got two pieces of good news. One: he waved at Miss Sandi when she said hi to him. I'm pretty sure it wasn't because she said hi, but learning to wave is really exciting. We hadn't told them that we were working on that with him. Another thing: they said he was babbling a lot today. I'm not surprised that he's babbling a lot, because he often does. What makes me glad is that they said he was saying "ba-ba-ba." He's added a new consonant!

Desperate for reading material, we're going to start The First Four Years tonight. I have my reservations.

1/12/11 (Wednesday)

Upon hearing the forecasts yesterday, I decided to take the day off today and avoid snow driving. As things turned out, we ended up having a family snow day and all stayed home. When Cara went out for the first of two extended sledding outings, we decided to let Owen check out the snow. We put him into his slightly oversized snowsuit and took him down in the hill on the sled a few times--there were even a few three-man runs with Cara and Mommy. He really seemed to enjoy the rides. It was hard to tell what he thought of the snow.

Cara was hard to get inside once she'd gotten started. In addition to going down the hill on the sled (we also had to give her tiny snow shovel a few turns on the sled), Cara and I had some snowball fights and I was instructed to build her a snow shelter or fort. We managed to get her inside the first time because Mommy was baking sticky buns and making hot chocolate. She stayed inside for a while after that. The second time we got her in so we could get ready to go to PJ and Casey's house for playdate.

At the playdate, Cara tried to play with Casey.

Ron (to the girls): What are you doing?

Cara: We're playing "Flight."

Casey: This is a marriage cake!

Ron: Wedding cake?

Cara: There's no wedding.

Casey: We can just pretend.

Cara: All right, but you have to pretend to be a boy.

Casey: No!

Cara: Yes you do!

[This went back and forth a few times.]

Cara: Girls can't marry each other!

So that was interesting. Meanwhile, I was trying very hard to progress in PJ's Mariokart Wii game, with little success. At the end of the evening PJ and Ron showed me the last world in their new Mario game, which was very exciting.

Owen did a really cool thing earlier today. He was playing with a little sports-themed playset he got for Christmas, and he suddenly figured out that he was supposed to put the little plastic basketballs through the hoop. He did it over and over, to much applause on my part.

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