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Journal Key:

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

2/2/12 (Thursday)

It was our last day with Karen! It's very sad that we won't see her again. It's nice that Owen's made progress and that I'll have Thursday afternoons back, though!

Karen left us with a lot of ideas for things to work on over the next year or so. We tried a lot of them out today. One thing that went well was having Owen do a "bear-walk," basically straight-legged crawling. He wasn't sure about it when Karen showed him how or when she helped him try it, but when Cara demonstrated he went bear-walking after her. If he'll do five or ten feet, that's great.

Owen is still very much against jumping. We tried all jumping in a circle, singing songs, jumping off of things, jumping over things, being animals--everything! He did like it when Karen helped him jump off the bottom step as he came down, so we might be able to translate that into actual jumping.

We should try to remember when it gets warm out again: Karen suggests drawing chalk circles and having him jump from one to another, holding a sponge and squeezing it to wash the chalk away.

2/3/12 (Friday)

Owen stood up on the couch this morning and, appropos of nothing, said, "Grandmom . . . coming. Grandpop . . . coming." (Are you guilted yet?) Of course, he also thinks Rusty is coming.

It was a nice Family Fun Night. Owen, as has been his wont, "finished" dinner before he should have, but then I let him help make popcorn. He can open the microwave, put the popcorn in, sort of press start, and definitely try to hit other buttons or open the door again while it's running. It's a good thing he discovered that he really likes popcorn, because otherwise he'd have stayed on his chair, wanting to press more buttons. He'd been talking about being a pirate king, so we put on Pirates and ate popcorn.

Eventually Cara wandered downstairs, so Owen wandered downstairs to find her. When he called me to come down, too, he was at the top of the basement stairs, having decided that was more interesting than Cara. He wanted to play with his Star Wars guys and their spaceship, which all live in the basement. We all went down, and I gradually fed Owen one and a half hot dogs while the kids played. I hope this isn't really going to be the only way to get a full meal into him!

2/4/12 (Saturday)

Poor Owen only managed to nap for about an hour, and he woke up very unhappy. After I carried him around screaming for a while, I lay on the couch with him and put on the He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special. He snuggled up and lay with his head on my shoulder, watching. The only way I could tell that he was awake was that he'd pick his head up when Netflix stopped to rebuffer. I got nice and dozey, too. We don't get to cuddle much anymore, so it was really nice.

In the afternoon, I took him grocery shopping. He selected lots of produce. The thing he's best at, though, is saying "bye!" to everyone as we leave a store. He's very thorough and enthusiastic.

When we got home, PJ and Casey were already over for the evening! Owen loves hanging out with the bigger kids. While they play, he wanders around doing his own thing. The biggest problem this time was that he kept getting his hands on things like flags or magic wands, and it's hard to convince him not to whack people with them.

2/5/12 (Sunday)

We went to Middletown for the Superbowl! Owen had kind of a tough evening: he'd had two days of bad naps, and even though he's been waking up so early lately he also woke up in the night last night. He did take Grandmama right upstairs to play with the neigh-neighs as soon as we got there, though, and he spent some time with the big zoo. He got a big straw hat, which he carried around and made several of us wear. He thought that was very funny.

He had a nice bath and we got in the car some time after eight. Pirates was on, and Owen wanted to say, "I am a pirate king!" He had hiccups, though, so at first he couldn't get past "I am--" It went on for a good thirty seconds. He was asleep before we got on the parkway.

2/6/12 (Monday)

Poor Owen fell on the sidewalk this evening outside YBR, but it was when he was going the wrong way and ignoring my increasingly urgent instructions to turn around and come back. Afterwards, he was a lot more compliant! If you're going to fall down and get upset, you might as well learn a somewhat unrelated lesson.

Yesterday we introduced Owen to the joys of the piggy-back ride. He really likes it, particularly if Cara is getting one at the same time. He doesn't hold on yet, so it's an interesting challenge. Today, though, when Teela and Batman were hanging out, to distract them from trying to ride Battle Cat (neither of them has legs that bend that way), I suggested that Teela give Batman a piggy-back ride. Owen liked that idea and made it his own. I'm not sure which of them was giving the other the piggy ride, but it involved a lot more hitting than the rides we'd been having.

2/7/12 (Tuesday)

This morning I actually got to sleep until my alarm went off for the first time in...many days. Actually, technically Owen's crying had already woken me up a few minutes before my alarm went off, but I laid in bed until it did anyway, and relished the moment.

We have restricted ourselves to only watching He-Man in the mornings. Actually Owen generally would prefer to watch She-Ra--I can't say I agree--or will particularly request "beast monster." The Beast Monster is the unlikely name of a creature that She-Ra must face in the early stages of the He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special. Their fight is ludicrously short and consists of She-Ra getting onto her flying horse for five seconds, until the pursuing Beast Monster trips and falls into a hole and is never seen again. Perhaps it's the fact that I find this incredibly amusing that has made it stick in Owen's head.

Tonight was dance night and so Mommy dropped Cara off and took Owen shopping. Mommy wanted socks, but Owen found the women's underwear section and insisted on pointing out all of the underwear with animal prints on it. When everybody got home, I was making "breakfast for dinner." Lately, Owen has been very unhappy at the prospect of sitting in his booster to eat dinner. Tonight, the prospect of pancakes and eggs and bacon was enough to keep him at his chair for a while, eating--though I can't say that he actually sat very much. He tends to stand in the chair a lot. He was a big fan of the bacon, which surprised me since I can't remember the last time he's had that. Eventually Cara went off somewhere and Owen suddenly decided he was "all done." He was still very interested in having some bacon, though, even as I pulled him from his chair.

In his bath tonight, Owen had his Playmobil people all lined up on the rim and I asked him how many he had. "One, two, three, five, six, seven!" he counted. True, he missed one, but I was pretty impressed! Out of the bath and in his pajamas, he found his Babar book and decided he wanted to hear that. He hefted the book, which is a big volume containing six smaller books, into the bathroom, and laid it on the toilet lid, declaring "I read it, Cara!" When it was actually book time, I asked him to carry it back to his room. Suddenly he realized it was heavy. "Heavy, Mommy!" he said to Evelyn, by way of good night.

2/8/12 (Wednesday)

A snowy evening! We had planned on getting some kind of takeout, but by chance we all arrived home without actually getting anything, so instead we found food in the house to eat for dinner. Owen was excited about bagel bites, and was willing to sit and eat a few before he wandered off. Then he "helped" make some popcorn, and actually helped to eat it. Mommy took him off for bath time, but he returned to have some hot dog. He seems more into eating now, possibly because he's getting over his cold.

I thought he said some pretty complicated complete sentences tonight, things like "Cara helped Owen get it" (that wasn't exactly it, but something of the sort).

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