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Journal Key:

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

9/6/12 (Thursday)

Owen got himself really exceptionally mulchy today, in cosmic payback for my having told him yesterday that mulch really is not meant to be picked up. The palms of his hands were brownish, and the backs of his hands were speckled with dirt, heading up his wrists. There was dirt on his forehead and his chin and on the side of his nose. His legs, well, they were scary too.

He insisted that he was not dirty.

Fortunately, Juliana was outside. She was on the phone, but Owen headed over and plopped down next to her. She put him on the phone to say hi to her daughter. He said hi, but then he just smiled at her. However, we got to hang out in the grass and maybe shake off some dirt before we came inside. Owen and Cara love to play on the grass. Owen actually did a forward roll! He's never quite had long enough legs before. I took off his shoes and shook the dirt from them and from his socks (how does he do that?) onto the grass instead of my carpet.

We headed inside and washed Owen's hands. There was still dirt caked under his fingernails, so I figured I'd try out a bubble bath to get that clean. We spent quite a while in the tub. Owen likes to play with the mermaids, who kept playing hide-and-seek in the bubbles.

9/7/12 (Friday)

It's nice to pick Owen up from YBR--he always comes running and clings to my legs, burying his face in them. Except for today. I got there and he ran over, but instead of grabbing me, he looked around. "My brother isn't here," he said. Well, no.

On the way to the car, we talked about it. He told me that Cara is his brother. I said she's his sister. We got into a back-and forth, "your sister"/"my buzzah" argument, which slowed us down because Owen got giggly. After I stopped off on our way through the parking lot to ask whether YBR had been discussing family relationships today and the teachers laughed at him, Owen was willing to admit that maybe I was right. "Cara is my sister," he told me.

After we got Cara, Owen said "When I am a big girl, I will turn into a boy."

Then, on the way home, he was talking about Steve and said, "My father likes Phineas and Ferb."

Someone's been teaching him some new words!

9/8/12 (Saturday)

Sometimes we take Owen somewhere and he asks, "Is this the library?" Alternatively, he confidently tells us, "This is the library." Well, today we actually took him to the real library. He did identify it. He and Steve sat and read books while Cara and I picked out some to take home. We found a couple of Chris van Dusens; he wrote The Circus Ship. He's a great rhymer.

Owen went to see Juliana when we got home. He always goes to see her, and he often invites her back to the house. I made pizza while the rest of the family went over to her yard.

Both kids enjoyed lunch. Owen needed most of his cut up, though we left him the big ends of the pieces to pick up and eat. They mainly ended up upside-down in his hands, somehow, but he ate them. He ate three pieces of pizza! (The pieces are much smaller than normal.)

When Owen woke up from his nap, Grandmama and Grandpapa were here to take him and Cara away for a sleepover. They packed the afternoon with fun, as usual. This time, they went to the beach.

9/9/12 (Sunday)

We'd agreed that the kids would come home around lunchtime, but they were happy to stay at Grandmama's house and color. Some time after eleven Grandmama called and put Owen on the phone with Steve for what Steve describes as a surprisingly lucid conversation. Owen reported that he was having a good time coloring. Grandmama had hoped that speaking to his father would light a spark of homesickness in Owen's heart. Nope! Telling Cara that Claire was up here, though, was enough to get the show on the road.

The five of us had a lovely afternoon out, since Owen had napped on the brief trip up. After lunch we went into Highland Park and walked down to Donaldson Park, where Owen had far more adults to run around with than usual. He went in under the playset to a shady area with a plastic shelf, which he decided was his kitchen. First he cooked something tiny and invisible which he brought to me (at first I assumed he'd found a tiny piece of garbage), but then he picked up some mulch to cook. He got a big stick to stir it with, and he'd go marching around declaring that he had the power of Greyskull in his stick. With which he cooked ice cream.

Soon enough the adults decided that it was hot out in the sun and that therefore it was time for phase two: ice cream. We popped Owen back into the stroller and walked back up to Main Street. Owen got some chocolate soft-serve, which he ate rather successfully. He spent most of his time playing with his He-Mans.

This evening we did a lot of pillow fighting. Owen likes falling on pillows and on people, and he likes to do a "power punch" on the bed. A power punch involves sort of punching while sort of spinning and then falling down. Today we discovered the "power fall," which involves me lying on my back while Owen stands on my stomach and then falls over backwards. I don't see how anyone could get enough of that. I so want to get him into gymnastics classes!

9/10/12 (Monday)

Coincidentally, Owen had gymnastics at school today! We could tell because he got stamps on his hands. He got three on each hand; they're small and round and looked sort of like bug bites. Steve and I both asked about them and he told us both that he had done gymnastics. What did he do at gymnastics? He got these stamps.

I had a full bag of groceries, my lunch box, my purse, and Owen's lunch box to carry into the house. Naturally, Owen wanted to be picked up. Luckily, Cara, down by the door with the keys, heard me trying to explain to him why he really ought to walk. "Owen," she called, "you can't catch me!" It worked.

Cara reports that her teacher told her she acts like a third grader! It took me several seconds longer than it should have to do the mental math to be able to answer, "That's great!"

9/11/12 (Tuesday)

Today, Big He-Man did not come in the car with us in the morning. This is somewhat unusual, since he's been coming with us for at least a couple of days. We call him "Big He-Man" to tell him apart from the old He-Man figure. (He is also bigger than all of the old figures.) In the car, Owen decided to ask where we were going. This seems to have become a habit with him. He really should know the answer by now, but he may find comfort in hearing it again: "We're dropping Cara off at school, and then we're dropping you off."

In the evening, I had the kids because Evelyn went to Back to School Night to meet Cara's teacher. The three of us had dinner. Owen first ate two bananas in succession. Last night I gave him a banana by breaking off pieces; tonight, I peeled the banana and had him hold it and eat it that way. He had to come over partway through to have me peel it some more, but it worked out. Even after two bananas, he also ate some dinner.

We have taken to reading He-Man mini-comics in the evenings, now--for a while we'd managed to hide the things from Owen--and he objects to my just making up the story. I thought I did a wonderful job spicing up one of the older ones, but he can tell when I'm not reading the clunky, verbose original, and insists that I stick to script. Sometimes I still manage to skip one or two sentences.

9/12/12 (Wednesday)

Today instead of taking Owen to Yellow Brick Road in the morning, I drove him over to Saint Peter's Hospital in New Brunswick, where we had an appointment with a pediatric cardiologist. Most of you reading this will probably remember that when he was born, the doctors spotted a heart defect with a clever little acronym which I have already forgotten (it definitely had a V in it somewhere). It became pretty clear early on that it was not a major problem and that it was most likely going to close up on its own. This visit was supposed to be the follow-up where they told us "it's gone now, good-bye!" It didn't quite work out that way, but it was kind of close.

Last time I took Owen to St. Pete's was quite a while ago. If I remember correctly, he slept in his infant carrier while I struggled to find a parking spot and wandered into the wrong waiting room before finally arriving in the right place. This time, he was quite excited to arrive in the waiting room and find a lot of kiddie activity tables and things sitting there. "Hey!" he would say, noticing some gears, or a ball in a track; then, "Hey!" when he noticed the next thing. He was rather possessive of the toys and didn't want me horning in on them.

By an amazing coincidence, Owen managed to poop at the very moment we were called in. After a quick change in the restroom, we got Owen weighed and measured. He was good and stood on the scale, and stood still long enough to have his height approximated. The last time we were there, we eventually ended up in a dark room with him on a table, and he was basically given an ultrasound to check on his heart. This time, the nurse put "stickers" all over him, and attached little alligator clips to the stickers, and got an EKG readout. Owen was a bit weirded out by this but he submitted to it well enough.

When the doctor finally arrived, all she had to do was listen with a stethoscope. The verdict: he's probably totally okay, but they don't want to tell us that and then turn out to be wrong. So we're going back in two years. He is slightly more susceptible to infections (?), so we have to be careful with his oral hygiene and always get him checked out by a pediatrician when he has a fever. Other than that he is a normal boy.

The doctor was, it seemed, rather disturbed by his action figures. We brought a couple of He-Mans (naturally), but they were both rather disreputable bad guys (Whiplash--"Wiss-splash"--and Mer-Man), which the doctor described as "very scary." We found some kind of Little People princess castle in the examination room when we arrived, and the He-Mans had been crawling around on it, as well as a big plastic mailbox toy. Even with all that fun, Owen was glad when it turned out we were really leaving. I spend a lot of time lugging Owen around places, but for some reason we walked side by side in the hospital most of the time. We were very slow--I think at one point someone in a wheelchair passed us--but we got where we needed to go.

Tonight Evelyn had Back to School at Linwood, so I came home and made dinner. It could have gone better, but it could have gone worse. The next time I give Owen plain spaghetti, I'll remember to put a little oil on it, so he doesn't sit at the table shaking sticky bits of pasta off his hands, saying "I don't like this!"

Cara, when given the opportunity to turn on the TV without Owen around, put on A Night at the Opera.

A brief note from Mommy: Owen and I were walking down the steps at YBR with his lunch box, when Audrey came along to show us her lunch box.

Audrey: I have a blue one, too!

Me: Yes, you have a Scooby Doo one, and Owen has a robot.

Audrey: . . . mine has a dog.

Owen: I'm not a robot!

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