A Going Concern

Bachelorhood

Owen and my lovely wife spent a week in Manitoba recently.  There were lots of phone calls and bedtime stories read over the phone.  It was strange at first, not having them around; then there was the realization that I could do literally whatever the hell I wanted, on my own schedule; then I decided that I really couldn't do literally whatever the hell I wanted, because my wife and son were in Manitoba and mostly just then I wanted to play trucks with Owen.

He's a very little man and it's a very big house and I don't quite understand how it can feel so empty without him.

Social Animal

The other day I took Owen out of bed and got him changed, and then started to carry him out of the room.  He reached for his crib, where Cow and Monkey were still sitting, since he'd forgotten them there.  "Guys?" he says, reaching out for them.  "Guys!?"

My lovely wife has been packing up some of the younger toys he's outgrown and replacing them with more advanced stuff.  Part of this means Owen discovering things that he hasn't really outgrown, but for whatever reason were consigned to a bin or a nook or cranny.  His Blackberry is one such item. 

Last time he had his hands on it, he was old enough to know that phones are cool because Mom and Dad have them but not really old enough to know what they're used for.  He's now figured that out, and as a result, he spent a lot of time walking around the house with the phone up to his ear, saying, "Hello, Owen, hello, Owen" and "yes, yes".  Sometimes he'd hold it in front of himself to speak, speaker style, and sometimes he'd just hit all the buttons to send texts. 

Every so often I'd talk to him on my phone and he'd crack right up.

My favourite part was when I asked who he was talking to and he said "Doctor".  I asked which doctor and my lovely wife asked, Do you mean Doctor Who?  And he confirmed: "Doctor Who!"

He doesn't necessarily get all the subtleties of communication yet though.  My lovely wife was telling me about a dream she had, complete with a long and involved series of strange decisions and inexplicable setbacks, in the manner of dreams.  After a while we looked over at Owen and he was staring at her with a look of, "What the hell were you doing" on his face, just not understanding at all what she was talking about.

Development

Owen very rapidly lurched into multi part words (Elephant, Motorcycle) and multi-word sentences.  I noticed it his first night back from Manitoba when I asked if he'd hugged Panda and he said "Not yet!"  Now he's stringing together words like nobody's business.

He got some new books for his birthday.  Of special significance are the Doctor Seuss books "Ten Apples Up On Top" and "The Shape of Me".  Apples On Top, in particular, is his new literary obsession.  He's gradually drawing down but for a while there it was 2-4 times a day he'd get you to read that thing.  "On top!" he says.  "Not drop!"

Also, he's figured out how to open the front door.  Well, we had a good run.

Bedtime

Owen's been very good about staying in bed in the morning.  Even when he's awake, he'll talk and play but he won't get out of bed until someone goes to get him.  So imagine my surprise the other morning when I went to get him and found him out of bed, diving to get back with his hands on the edge of his toddler-bed, looking up at me with a red-handed expression. 

"What are you doing out of bed?" I ask.

He holds up a soother.  "Pink," he says.  "Out."

"Your soother was out of bed and you were going to get it back?"

"Ya."  He pulls himself into bed.

"Would you like to get out of bed?"

"Ya."  He jumps out of bed.

Comedy

Owen was walking around while my lovely wife and I were not entirely committed to the idea of getting out of bed.  He was wearing his PJs under his newer sleep sack, a much larger pink outfit with holes in the bottom for his feet so he can get around in it.

Suddenly he starts saying, "Foot!  Out!  Foot!  Out!"  My lovely wife observes that he must have a foot stuck inside his sleep sack.  He just kept repeating "Foot Out" and it reminded me so much of a robot stuck on a command in an old Star Trek episode.  FOOT OUT FOOT OUT ERROR ERROR FOOT OUT ERROR

Part of me wants to teach him to say "ERROR" when something is wrong and he needs help.  I'm a horrible person.

He was wearing a shirt the other day that my mom got for him.  On the front it shows a dump truck emptying its bucket, which is full of cookies.  The back is a reverse angle on the same thing.  He loved it.  Trucks!  Cookies!  What's not to love?

He got his hair cut today.  When he goes, he goes to a place where he can sit in a big plastic car and play with its steering wheel while they cut his hair.  Afterwards he got pizza.

Last night I mentioned I needed to go get a haircut and he leaned towards me with an earnest expression and a nod.  "Car," he said, trying to convey that I should totally go to the place where I can sit in a car while they do it.

Looking for a new phone

My phone is quite old and is starting to die.  It's mostly okay but it sometimes turns off without warning, most likely due to a loose connection.  I've also cracked the otterbox case at some point so I guess it's about time to look for an alternative.

Wish list:

• Android, obviously, although I'd consider Blackberry.
• Screen size doesn't matter.
• Camera quality is massively important.
• Waterproof is a huge plus.
• Dedicated camera button is a huge plus.
• Better horsepower than what I have now (which won't be hard).
• Ideally a Google, Motorola or Sony; if not that, HTC is okay.
• Ideally less than $400 off contract, $450 absolute tops.

Candidates so far: Nexus 5; whatever replaces the Nexus 5; HTC One M8 from Wind (would have to wait until April); Xperia Z1 Compact (on sale because the very similar Z3C is coming soon); Moto G (much cheaper but much less of a phone).

An Unpleasant Discovery

I noticed today that the fog lights on my car are gone.  When the hell did that happen?  Did somebody just unscrew and make off with the bulbs?  Who does that?

I can't remember the last time I bent over to look at them.  It could have been months.

Sometimes you notice something and you wonder what else you aren't noticing.




 

If You Were Really Achieving In Life You Too Would Have A Truck In Your Ceiling

On our way back from Toronto this weekend, we stopped in at Montana's for dinner.  Owen was fidgety and pissy and not in a good mood, until I pointed out that they had a truck in the ceiling.  It's a full size old-fashioned red pick up truck and it was suspended on beams and logs up in the open ceiling, and he was amazed.

Repeatedly, over the course of the meal, every time I needed a distraction, I'd say, "There's a truck in the ceiling", and he would light up and say, "TRUCK!"

Toronto

To back up a bit, we went to Toronto this weekend to visit friends.  We visited pubs and drank lots of good beer, played the Firefly Boardgame well into the wee hours, visited the Steamwhistle brewery and the train museum and rode on a steam train, and visited Meeplemart, which is a couple of blocks from our friend's condo and, seriously, is all that I had hoped it would be. 

Owen was amazed by the trains.  That was probably the highlight of the trip, until he saw the truck in the ceiling.

Sleep Habits

We have a little pop-up sleeping tent that we borrowed from some friends.  We decided to start to transition him from the crib and using the tent as his sleeping area kills two birds with one stone: it gets him used to not sleeping in the crib (which is also to say, sleeping in a place he can leave when he wants to) and accustoms him to the tent, so we can use it when we travel. 

Since we've been on the go pretty much constantly since Canada Day, it's seen a lot of use, and we're fortunate that he's taken to it very quickly.  He loves the thing.

He also has been very good about staying in it until we come to get him.  I was pretty sure he was going to wander into our room that first morning, once he woke up, but he stayed put.

The other night he started making noise.  I went in to see what was wrong and he was half out of the tent; I think he rolled over and couldn't get back into the tent in his drowsy state.  I put him onto his back.  Mostly asleep, he grabbed his soother and put it in his mouth, then let his arms fall to the side.  Then, without opening his eyes, he blindly groped with his right hand until he found cow, then draped cow over his face and head, and let his arm flop to his side, and was asleep.

Language

Anything that he can't see is Hiding.  I ask him, "Where is Owen's belly?"  He looks at the shirt covering him.  "Hiding," he says.

Lots of stuff is crying.  At first it was just babies -- "Crying," he says, glumly, pointing at the picture of the laughing baby on the tempra box -- but then it was animals, and toys, and all sorts of things.  One time, a motorcycle was crying.  I'm still unsure whether the word has some hidden meaning for him or whether he just likes the sound of it.

Cow

Owen was sitting with his truck book and Cow.  He touched Cow's nose against the page, over the picture of the loader and said, "Loader."  Then the crane: "Crane."  Finally, content that Cow's education in the world of trucks had progressed to a satisfactory degree, he put Cow aside, saying, "Enough."

He certainly is in a good position to teach the recognition of trucks and related vehicles.  When he hears a siren he'll point out whether it's a fire truck or an ambulance, and he's usually right.

The other day I was reading to him and the book requires you to match the driver with their vehicle.  I pointed to the construction worker and asked him to find the digger, because that's the label the book used, and he held up his hands in the "I don't know" motion he uses when he can't find something.  I pointed to it and he said, "Loader," which, of course, is what it was.

Fashion Criticism

He still doesn't like my fashion choices.

On at least two occasions, as I'm getting dressed in the morning, he has stopped me to protest my decisions, principally that I wanted to put on an orange shirt.  He insisted I go with green.

In the restaurant (with, you will recall, a truck in the ceiling), he stopped mid conversation to pull on my shirt and say Off, Green.  I asked if I was supposed to wear a green shirt and he confirmed that I was.  My lovely wife pointed out that we were on the last day of our packed clothes and I didn't have a green shirt, and I certainly wasn't going to change in the middle of the restaurant.

I told him that I could wear a green shirt tomorrow.  He gravely shook his head.  "Orange," he corrected me.

Sometimes you just can't win, I suppose.
 

Observations

Language

Owen is getting more ambitious in his speech.  He's still picking up multiple words per day but he's starting to work on tying together multiple syllables.  While he still tends to just use the last syllable, sometimes he'll string together bigger ones.

His aunt Dawn gave him an elephant that has pictures and says words and one of the things it shows is a monkey on a motorcycle.  Usually it'll say Monkey or Motorcycle with the appropriate sound, but sometimes it says, "Monkey, you're Marvelous!"  The first time it said that, Owen gave a delighted laugh in agreement.  "Malalas!"

He also quite likes "Nice".  Originally, skin was nice, and then legs were nice, and for a while, lots of things were nice.

He uses "minutes" as a plea for a few minutes to play, for example, after dinner, before he goes up to bed.  "Minutes?  Minutes?"

He's working on pluralizing, too.  Some things (Cars) he got quickly.  He's working on "busses" now, but it still often comes out as "bussesses".

Colours

I really need to work on getting the second bedroom painted for him.  My expectation is that we'll move him over once he's ready to sleep in a bed, but we don't want to leave it too late, as it would be unfortunate if a theoretical second child was pushing him out of the room.  We want it to not be his room anymore well in advance of any such possibility.

He quite likes the pink, though.  His favourite soother is pink and his sleep sack (new and enlarged format, with openings for the feet) is pink.

The Things My Wife Has To Put Up With (An Actual Chat Log)

SOOOOO UNIMPRESSED

we were getting ready to leave

and I was looking at the text on my phone and email message on my computer

Owen comes over to me and starts grunting like he wants to get something/show something

I thought he wanted my phone so I said no and looked down at him

his shirt was completely unbuttoned and he needed his diaper changed

and THEN I saw that his hands were COVERED IN POOP

he had unbuttoned his shirt and stuffed his hands in his diaper

not just ONE BUT BOTH!!!

god knows what ELSE he has left his trail of poop on

I already found it on my desk

Bear

There is a cartoon bear on the yoghurt containers.  Owen likes to look at him.  The other day he got one which didn't have a bear.  He kept turning it over and over, saying, "Hiding?  Hiding?"  He was quite upset.

It's hard to tell what is going to upset him.  One of his books has a safari thing at the zoo and there's a safari car on the road, and a turtle is crossing the road, and he gets upset that the turtle is going to be run over.

A Real Conversation

Me (reading a book with Owen): Who's that?

Owen: 'Anta!  Ho ho!

Me: That's right, that's Santa.

Owen: Bus.

Me: .... he brings busses?

Owen: Ya.

Trucks, Of Various Sorts

Owen really likes the garbage truck.  On Wednesday mornings we get him up to watch all four of the trucks go by (one recycling and one garbage, going in each direction around the crescent).  He watches from each of the windows from which you may monitor the progress of the trucks. 

He's gotten into fire trucks more now that he's had a chance to climb on some real ones.  I got him a Green Toys fire truck and he loves it.  I'd say that fire trucks are probably better than garbage trucks now, although clearly inferior to busses.

I like to keep abreast of the fluctuations in the stock of these various entities. 

Letter

Today I wrote a letter to my MP, Gordon O'Connor, and to Peter MacKay, who is not my MP but who is primarily responsible for me writing the letter in the first place, so I thought he should get a copy.

I've never written an angry letter to Parliament before.  Did you know you don't need postage?  What a remarkable country we live in.

=====

Dear Mr. MacKay and Mr. O’Connor,

I am a resident of the riding of Carleton-Mississippi Mills. Though I am not a member of the Conservative Party of Canada, I have been content to vote in favour of the Conservative nominee for Member of Parliament in my riding on more than one occasion, and I have heretofore not been given cause to question the wisdom of this action.

I am writing to you to call attention to bill C-36, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. It is my view that this bill is unconstitutional, immoral, poorly conceived, and ultimately would have a severely harmful effect upon the most vulnerable members of our society, should it be passed into law.

It is fundamental to the conservative viewpoint that government is an inefficient and unwieldy tool, and as such, interventions of government into the lives of the citizenry should generally be minimized. There is, however, a more prurient strain of conservative thought which abandons this philosophy when presented with an issue couched in moral terms. Prostitution is surely the most trying such issue, laying bare the division between those who believe most strongly in the right of the individual to pursue their own affairs free of interference so long as no harm is done to others, and those who see a role for government in regulating what is viewed as proper, moral behaviour.

Bill C-36 clearly proceeds from the latter conception. It supposes that prostitution is inherently immoral and inherently dangerous, an assertion explicitly made by Mr MacKay in this bill’s defense. It is conceived in the notion that rhetorical distinctions between the legality of purchasing and selling sex can offer some sort of shelter to people engaged in this activity while denying them the actual and enforceable protections that our country’s government and law enforcement institutions could, and should, provide. It supposes that prostitution can be eliminated and human nature altered by government decree and has no consideration for the likely harms that its prohibitions will inflict.

The government of this country possesses an awesome power, through the creation and enforcement of laws, and its monopoly upon the use of force for its own preservation. Being inherently mistrustful of such power and its potential for misuse, it seems self-evident that the government of Canada must always exercise such power in the most limited and judicious of fashions, in all cases concerning itself primarily with the impact of that exercise of power upon those most vulnerable to it.

It is clear, and has always been clear, that prostitution, however undesirable, will never cease to be practiced so long as humans persist upon the Earth, and so long as it is practiced, it is prostitutes themselves who are its most vulnerable participants. Any harm visited upon the industry of prostitution will be first and most direly felt by prostitutes themselves. Given this fact, it is imperative that the government consider, before all else, how to ensure that practitioners of prostitution are able to avail themselves most completely of the protection of the law and of the state. Any legal impediment to their ability to do this will inevitably result in the visitation of great harm upon some of the most vulnerable members of our society.

The name of this law clearly demonstrates the false understanding of cause and effect regarding the risks and consequences of prostitution. Prostitution is not inherently dangerous. It is presently dangerous because the government has vilified and criminalized it, and because the law forces it to be practiced in a dangerous fashion. Those who engage in prostitution are drawn to the practice from the most vulnerable segments of society, usually against their will, as a direct consequence of its illegality and the impediments created by the law against its safe, open and regulated practice. This is not an inherent characteristic of the act of prostitution, but an artifice created by the state through its enactment of prohibitionary laws.

Making prostitution illegal will not stop prostitution from happening, but it will force prostitutes to expose themselves to harm, and it will result in the deaths of innocent people. It is unconscionable that the government of this country would propose and seek to pass a law which will result, as a clear and obvious consequence, in the predictable victimization of its citizens. Moreover, the Supreme Court decision which resulted in the drafting of Bill C-36 makes it abundantly clear that such a consequence makes this law unconstitutional and unable to withstand an inevitable legal challenge.

It is incomprehensible to me that the government could expect this bill to be morally acceptable to the people of Canada, or considered lawful and compatible with the Constitution and the judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada, should it be passed.

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider this bill.

Should this bill be passed into law, I will be morally unable to support the Conservative Party of Canada in the next federal election.


Yours sincerely, etc.
 

Spring

I come home from work.  Is anybody home? 

I hear noise from the back, so I go to the far end of the house.  I see my lovely wife and Owen through the windows.  She points to me and asks him who is home.  He sees me and smiles.  He is wearing his red spring jacket and his bright red plastic Cars sunglasses, fine blonde hair short and spiky and soft, like Calvin from the comics come to life.

I collect my fleece and slip-ons and go out onto the deck in the back yard.  My lovely wife has been blowing bubbles for him.  He points at them and asks for more.  "Bubbles!"  There aren't going to be any more, not today, and he's disappointed, but it's hard to worry about that for long when it's a clear spring day and you're out on the deck and you can do anything.

My lovely wife tells me about their day as she unbundles the patio furniture.  It's nothing special, our patio furniture, but it's good enough.  It'll do for now.  I follow Owen around as he walks around the deck, peering at the wood boards that compose it, inspecting the pool, pausing to step carefully onto the rope that had bound tarps around the furniture.  I touch the cover on the pool and he does the same with his tiny hand, measured, careful.

He sees a leaf stuck between the floorboards and is worried.  He was frightened by a tangle of sticks that all moved together like a tangle of sticks do when he tried to push through them.  It seems that leafs are in the same distrusted category.  He'll grow out of it.

I sit down on the steps leading to the pool, still wrapped up from winter. 

Owen walks over to the steps, carefully turns, and sets his bum down beside me.  He doesn't look at me, playing it cool, watching the wind in the trees, but after a moment he shifts himself over a little closer.  Sitting with daddy.

This moment is never going to come again.  He's going as fast as he can, figuring out the world, turning into whoever he's going to be.  Summer is going to come, and his second birthday, and then other seasons, other years.  He's going to have his own life and his own worries and I'm going to lose him.

But right now, in this moment, we sit together on the step in the cool spring breeze.
 

The New Normal

Language

The little man is a going concern.  It's amazing to watch how fast he is changing.  Every single day he's becoming faster, quicker, adding new words, picking up on new subtleties.  He is fluid, changing faster than I can see, let alone keep up with.

He has a lot more words than he used to.  I couldn't put a number on it, but there's a lot of them, and there are more being added every day. 

What's even funnier are the non-word interjections he adds.  He says Oops! when he drops something, and when he trips and topples onto his bum, he says, Whoah!  When he gets excited he makes a little "O" with his mouth and breathes in appreciatively.  When he sees something that's supposed to impress, he says Ooooo.

He tries to whistle when he sees birds and he knows dogs go Woof.  He thinks the dinosaurs on my t-shirt are also dogs, a point on which I insist on correcting him, although I am on less firm scientific ground when I object to his assertion that they also go woof.  I mean, they might have.

Toys

The little man has expanded his coterie of buddies (as he has referred to them) who accompany him through his day and into his crib at night.  In addition to Cow, he's added Monkey, and Bear (a big white polar bear), and Bear (pooh bear in an easter bunny costume).  Add in Blanket and his water and it's an armful.

Bus!

This weekend we went to visit family and my lovely wife's dad, who drives a school bus, arranged to get the little man onto the lot.  When we turned into a parking lot filled with more than a dozen school buses parked in a row, his jaw hit the floor.  He wandered around in a daze, overwhelmed.

We loaded him onto one and took him for a ride.  He watched everything going by outside, in the zone.  Once we got back, he got to sit on Grandpa's lap with his hands on the wheel, and he got to use the lever to open and close the door.  I thought he wouldn't be strong enough to open and close it but he had no problem. 

Afterwards he walked up and down the row and inspected each one, touching their sides, tires, lights, bumpers.  Grandpa showed him that the door at the back opened and invited him to jump out of it and he did, hurling himself into the air without a second thought.

 He took his toy school bus to bed that night and woke up in the morning still excited about buses.  "Nice!" he said, brandishing it, upon awakening.

(I got lots of video.)
 

Communication

The theme du jour is definitely Communication.

Words Owen Knows And Can Say Distinctly

Daddy
Cow
Hair
Ears
Nose
Belly
Arms
Legs
Bum
Brrr!
Buddy (what I call him)
Desk
Car
Bus
BUS!
Owen

Enthusiasm

My lovely wife was working and she heard him making his "Something is wrong" noise.  When he persisted, she went to check on him.  She found him sitting in his wagon (the smaller one that my mom got him for Christmas), with Cow, waiting for a ride.  When she did not immediately come to pull him around, he leaned forward, and said, "PEEEEESE?"

Rides were had, as you might expect.

He's getting very good at conveying what he wants.  When my lovely wife went to get him a mum mum (a type of rice cracker) from the cupboard, he bobbed up and down on his toes, and then set his hands on his knees and bent forward, ill containing his excitement, to our great enjoyment.

Literature

When we read him stories, he knows what's coming.  He'll repeat words with you: when the Bear Stays Up, he says, "UP!"  When we read Hop on Pop, he says the right words ("Cup! (to Pup.)  No! (to Pat.)  Pop!  (To the hopping.)

My lovely wife just got him a copy of Go Dog Go, which my sister loved when she was little.  Owen quite likes the dogs driving cars.

There's a book of rhymes which includes "The Wheels on the Bus".  You don't normally get past the bus.

One of his favourites is Brown Bear, although really it should be called Purple Cat.  You get as far as Purple Cat, and then Purple Cat mostly sees more Purple Cat.

When I mention the title of the book, "Mister Brown Can Moo Can You", he answers me, "MOO!", in the affirmative.

Fashion Criticism

He continues to be unreasoningly critical of my wardrobe, especially sweaters.  His newfound mastery of the parts of the body sees expression here, as well; if he can, he'll pull up your shirt and point at you and proudly announce, "BELLY!"

He gets very concerned when you aren't wearing pants, and ought to be wearing pants.

Reasoning

Owen can clearly follow chains of reason.  You can make rational propositions to him and he will understand what you are saying, and act accordingly. 

"You need to go have a nap or you will be too tired to go swimming." 

"If you go to sleep now, when you wake up, mommy will be home." 

"I will take you downstairs to play after I go shovel the driveway." 

He can also remember things that happened a fairly long time ago and anticipate things that won't happen until tomorrow or the next day.  He's still fuzzy on how long things take, though; when we told him Grandma was coming over, he immediately wanted to go look to see her arrive, and wouldn't listen when we said she would be a few minutes.

He also seems to be developing an awareness of when he needs to go to the bathroom.  We've acquired a potty seat (Cars, naturally), although it's still very early for that sort of thing.

Favourite Toys

His small metal yellow school bus
His bigger plastic Sesame Street school bus
His even bigger Green Toys school bus
Superman in a car
Curious George in a car
His "Cars" (the animated movie) Owen-sized seat
Crayons!
Balls, of all sizes
Boom Sticks (my martial arts sticks and chucks)
Various Little People figures, including Elmo, a safari girl, Batman, and the Joker
Blocks (lego, mega, and other)
Green Toys tools
Various electronic music producing gadgets
Wagon (big outdoors)
Wagon (smaller indoors)
Music Playing Wind Production Device

I do not list Cow because Cow is more a companion than a toy, at this point.

How My Brain Works

I am more accepting of the monkey Curious George driving a car than I am of Superman driving one, because why does Superman need a car?  He can fly faster than a speeding bullet, a car is only going to slow him down.  (A co-worker pointed out cars can have GPS, and I replied he could just fly up high and look around.  I don't think that's sufficient evidence.  Another co-worker reluctantly agreed that he, too, found the monkey driver easier to accept.)

Little Buddy

I normally refer to Owen as Monkey or Buddy.  He likes Buddy and will say "Buddy" back to me when I refer to him as such.

He frequently asks for Daddy when I'm at work.  He can say Daddy quite clearly, but isn't so clear with Mom or Mommy.  This is, I believe strongly, because my lovely wife is around him much more than I am, so he is usually speaking to her, but usually speaking about me. 

Any doubts about his attachment to mom go away when she leaves to go curling and he breaks down in tears.  He is, however, getting much better about letting me entertain him and then put him to bed when mommy isn't around.  I suspect this is due to the aforementioned development of his ability to anticipate that she will be coming back shortly.

The past couple of nights, he has asked for me to put him to bed.  This is something I appreciate greatly.  When he was really little, my lovely wife would feed him and then I'd put him to bed.  After he decided to wean himself, he supplemented the loss of that connection with a requirement that my lovely wife be the one to put him to bed.  I missed doing that, and I'm glad that he's on board with me doing it more often.
 

Ninja Training

Development

Owen spent a lot of time working on walking and not working on talking.  He was able to communicate a sufficient amount by gesturing and grunting, or falling back on his multifunctional syllable "Da", and, being a dude, felt little need for more subtle or sophisticated interlocution.

He's now ramping up his speech again.  He used to be in a space, before he quieted down to focus on running, where mom and dad could understand him but other people would have problems.  Now that he's back on it again, he's rapidly expanding his vocabulary and introducing polysyllabic words.  "Ka" (Cows) has become "Kao-ssss!"  "Da" (Down) has become "Dooooo-N!" 

He's evolving into a wee drunk Scotsman, essentially.

Silverback

He has a lot of hair, all of a sudden.  Most of it is very fair, with some red layered on top.  At the back he's got a thick patch of hair which doesn't match, coarser and less well behaved and silver-white.  I suspect that this is something he got from Grandad. 

Posture

Owen also learned to sit down.  My lovely wife spied him carefully sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, lowering himself and then standing up and then sitting back down again, his face split with an incredibly self-satisfied grin.

He now will sit next to you, or sometimes on you, when you're on the floor.  You can tell he's engaging in this maneuver when he stops, turns his bum towards you, and begins a backwards shuffle until his heels make contact.  He can't see when he does this and so occasionally ends up comically misaligned. 

The bottom steps of the staircase on the ground floor have been Owen's Office since (literally) day 1, but now he's sitting there and not just using it as a desk.

He also walks on his toes a lot.  Like, a lot.  My lovely wife suspects he might be trying to be taller, like everybody else in the house.  I suspect he might just like the challenge of it. 

Bonk!

On the subject of ruining my son (a recurring theme, you will find), I taught Owen to (gently!) bonk foreheads as a sign of affection, much as the Klingons do.  He does it to me, and to my lovely wife, and sometimes with friends and family.  On one notable occasion he did it to cow.

Sartorial Criticism

Owen doesn't like my sweaters.

It's true.  He will, quite frequently, take issue with a sweater I'm wearing.  He also doesn't like my workout pants, but mostly it's sweaters.  He doesn't do this to my lovely wife; he walks over, plucks at my sleeve, looks at me with a concerned furrough of his brow, and shakes his head, No.

This reached its peak with my Dad Sweater, a heavy zip-up sweater I got ages ago.  He really disliked it.  Finally, at one point (when I fortuitously was trying to get him dancing on video, thus recording the whole exchange), he took issue with it and I took it off to see if that would appease him.  He dragged it all the way from the kitchen to the front hall and then tried to put it on the coat rack, despite it being many times taller than he is.  I put it on it for him and asked if that was better, and he nodded enthusiastically. 

He had decided that, because it has a zipper, it's an outside coat, which means that a.) it doesn't belong inside the house and b.) I shouldn't be wearing it lest I leave.

 

Cheers!

Owen has learned 'cheers'.

Well, I say "he learned".  I taught him 'cheers'.  He now does it enthusiastically, sometimes a bit too much so, whenever he has a drink and so does someone else, or someone has a drink and he has a soother, or sometimes when my lovely wife is reading him a story which mentions Christmas Cheer, and he raises his fist into the air as if hoisting his goblet high.  "Cheeeee!" he proclaims.

He also picked up on me making light-saber noises while we played with my light sabers.  I introduced him to the android Lightsaber noise app, as one does.  He thought that was delightful.  The next morning my lovely wife was changing him and he was waving his soother around, making ZHOO ZHOO ZHOO noises as he moved it.

(Teaching him to pretend his soother is a sonic screwdriver remains a work in progress.)

Ninja

Owen likes to put things into things.  He has a big tent and ball pit, courtesy of his aunt, and he likes to pile the balls into it.  Recently my lovely wife came into the kitchen to find the sink full of balls, something like 30 of them.  This is a remarkable achievement considering he can barely reach up to push the ball into the sink on his tiptoes, he has to do them one at a time, and he did so dozens of times without her noticing.

This is not the only area in which he is developing his ninja skills.

We bought him some bath toys and one of them, a rubber fish ball, disappeared after about ten minutes.  We couldn't find it anywhere.  Much later, my lovely wife found it; it was in the garage, far from the door.  The only time I opened the door to the garage, which is heavy and on a retractor arm, was for a moment to throw the packaging from those toys into the recycling bin.  In that narrow window, with me standing in the doorway, he managed to throw the ball in behind my back and then back away from the door and look innocent, all without me catching on.

Ninja.
 

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

September

 We had an offer in hand on our place on Castle Glen, so we put in an offer on a house on Sunnyside. It was older, and needed a bit of work, but it had a lot going for it, and we really liked it. Our offer was negotiated to a place everyone could live with. We were moving to Stittsville.

Then the inspection happened. Things did not go well. We named the price that we would require to make us more comfortable with the prospect of taking on a large dying tree on the edge of a busy road, and the other party was not amenable, so we walked. Becoming emotionally invested in a house you don't own yet is a sucker's game. Still, we were in a bind. November 7 was coming fast, two months and a day away as my lovely wife and I sat in Cabotto's and enjoyed a rare dinner out alone, on the eve of our anniversary.

On the twelfth, the Thursday before leaving on a long scheduled camping trip with friends, we went to look at two houses. Neither seemed like a sure thing, but even as we mentally prepared for the likelihood that we would need to put most of our worldly goods in storage and find a place to rent for the duration, we wanted to keep looking. The right house, we told each otheer, was out there somewhere.

I left work for the afternoon and met my lovely wife and the little man at the first house. It had a lot going for it, but it had an equal number of serious problems. It had a great room near the front to serve as Susan's office, a great living room, huge bedrooms; it had a tiny backyard dominated by an in-ground pool, it was on the corner of a busy street, it backed onto a pool, the kitchen was tiny. Parts of the house were very impressive but we couldn't really see ourselves living there. It just didn't feel like our house.

It started to rain as we headed over to Stittsville to look at the other one. The pictures had looked good, but we weren't sure how well it would fit for us. I struggled to get my phone's GPS to work (Google had just dropped the separate start icon for Navigation in their ongoing quest to fuck up a good thing) and ended up following the realtor and my lovely wife and hoping not to get lost. By the time we got there it was pouring down rain and the realtor had to run in to open up the garage so we could get the little man out without soaking him.

We looked around the house, and gradually, the tone of the conversation changed. "This isn't bad" became "this is pretty good", which became "we could use this room for that". By the time the rain had petered out and we got a good look at the deck and the pool, we were pretty much sold.

Follow up appointment was on the Monday. They had an open house scheduled for the Sunday, which introduced a bit of nervousness, but we weren't going to pull the trigger without giving it some time to sink in.

Our offer was accepted. Our original schedule suited them fine. Papers were signed. We were moving to Stittsville. You know ... again.


October

  Some time in October, Owen decided it was time to walk. 

Once he had made the decision to do so, he gained confidence with it very quickly, and before long he was tottering headlong wherever he wanted to go, occasionally toppling over and always swinging his arms about as if disconnected and separate from his pumping legs, a huge grin plastered across his face.  He already knew how to go up stairs but he has added the ability to go down them, conscientiously turning himself around and going feet first.  Sometimes he is inclined to slide down a few on his belly, but I don't think it's reasonable to hold that against him.

He noticed that my lovely wife and I make a popping noise when we pull the soother out of his mouth, and he started doing it too.  Then he started making that noise to indicate that he wanted his soother.  In Owen's mind, the name for a soother is a quick smacking POP sound. 

Vroom is the noise his car makes.  Bonk is the word for tapping your heads together as a sign of affection (although he once did this a little more energetically in the direction of the bridge of my nose than I would have preferred).  Boom means rough-housing, throwing balls around and the like; boom-boom-boom is the word for my punching bag, currently resident on the basement floor where he can slap at it to his heart's content.

He's a tough kid, and strong.  Gently slapping his hand or flicking his nose is not generally an effective deterrent; he doesn't respond to that sort of thing, and he has to pretty seriously take a tumble for him to respond badly to it.  He happily will push around things much bigger than himself and in his sorting of pantry contents I've seen him quite handily toss around cans and boxes which I would have thought far too heavy for a little man to move the way he does.

Order is his compulsion.  He likes to take things out of containers, and then put them back.  He likes to gather and sort.  He has a panic noise he uses to indicate that something is out of order, quite distinct from his energized, I-am-in-real-trouble panic noise.  If something falls on the floor, or tumbles and spills, he becomes very concerned at the disorder, and he will make sure you know it.

My lovely wife had given him a trio of nutella containers to play with and he had arranged them into a careful stack.  While feeding him, my lovely wife accidentally knocked them over, and he was very, very concerned.  When she finished his meal and let him down, he crawled over to survey the damage, lamenting the chaos and wondering how he would ever set it right.

November


The move went as well as could be hoped.  Westmount Movers get a strong recommendation from us, and my lovely wife also found a company to steam clean the carpets that she would not hesitate to use again.  Everything got moved in on Saturday the second and we had four days after that to clean and unpack and sort before we needed to be out.  On the Wednesday we walked through the house one last time.

It was a little emotional, I'm not going to lie.  The empty rooms and bare white walls made me think of the young couple, as yet unmarried and many years from parenthood, who it had found.  A lot of years and a lot of life happened in that house; a few bad times and a lot of good.  The people who left a helpful note and locked the doors are not the people who came to it so long ago.

But I find it hard to miss the old place very often.  The new house immediately felt like home.  It is so much better suited to us, with more space and a better location and much better arrangement for the way we've found we like to live our lives.  We have much deeper and richer soil in which to put down our roots.

So now all of our stuff is here and we are slowly unboxing and setting up.  The pieces of new furniture we need sooner rather than later are being accumulated; my desk is here, some incidentals.  We still need a bed for the guest bedroom and some lights.  It's coming along.

Owen did very well through the move; he is a trooper.  He spent a lot of time with his Grandmas.  The week after the move was a little more trying with him, as he eventually gave in to the urge to cling; although he is used to me being gone a great deal, my lovely wife has historically always been around, and he overcompensated a bit once he got her back.  But he handled the actual chaos and disruption of the move itself in fine style, so one can't complain.

There is still a lot of work to be done on the house.  I have a housewarming party to plan, at some future point when order has been established, and all the potential space has become actual space, and we are settled.  There is a great deal to unpack and set up.  But you can see the shape of it.  It's already a comfortable place, friendly and warm. 

All the way along, my lovely wife told me that the right house was out there, waiting for us, and we just had to find it.  Now, here, at the far side of all of that work and worry, I sit snug and comfortable and happy, and I have to say that she was right, and it was, and we did.




　

There are Easier Ways to Do That

Once your child reaches a certain age, you get asked a lot of questions about whether they are walking yet, and whether they are talking yet.  Back before we were Owened I thought, without really having given it much consideration, that these were more or less binary conditions; a child either was walking, or was not walking.  In the actual event, it's not that straight forward.

Owen is not really walking yet.  He could, if he wanted to.  He can stand very solidly without assistance, turning and carrying things, but he doesn't take steps without something to hold onto with at least one hand. 

He's figured out how to use his walker, a plastic wheeled contraption that plays music as it moves.  This gets him closer to the efficiency of walking, without really requiring the leap of faith that unassisted perambulation demands.  Amusingly, if you call him to you, he will sometimes crawl to the walker and then use that to walk over to you.  He hasn't yet realized that he can just as easily do without the intermediate step, but I suspect it won't be long.

He's also built up a pretty decent vocabulary, albeit mostly one solely comprehensible to mom and dad.


ka - Car

ba - Bus (one of his favourites, especially school busses and double deckers, about which he gets very excited)

nanana - banana

dan - done, as in, I am finished with this thing you are attempting to feed me

a-dan - all done, time to let me out of my chair.  Usually accompanied by waving, in the manner of a person frantically signalling to an approaching vehicle that the bridge is out.


He supplements his words with a variety of motions and signals.  He is an enthusiastic nodder.  When you ask him if he wants something that he really really wants, he nods with his entire body, flexing his knees and legs.  He also shakes his head no, usually in a solemn manner when you tell him not to do something.  He also points, sometimes supplementing his pointing with a loud "DA!"

He really likes Shreddies.  In one mighty bound, they have overtaken all other post-fooding cereal snacks in his affections.

He still loves music.  We've discovered that TSO is a particularly potent attraction for him; playing one of their better songs is a practically guaranteed way to get him to Rock Out. 

He also sings along with me.  I'll sing some made up tune, "da da da da da", and when I pause, he'll take up the refrain with his own chipper "da da da da da".  He's always done this, but his "da da" s are getting faster and more rhythmic, with a bit of a tune clearly detectable.  Not the tune I'm singing, of course, but then I have a multi-decade head start on him and I can't carry a tune in a bucket, so I'm not one to point fingers.

(We also have this thing where you bomp your head into the other person's belly as a sign of affection.  It's something we do.  Not as cultured as the musical thing, I know.)

(Also: we took him to the Oktoberfest up at Beau's.  Getting out of the car upon arrival, the couple next to us noticed Owen, as they deployed their own progeny into the panoply of baby equipment, and remarked -- Oh, look, another first timer!  We pointed out to them that, no, he's been to this one before.  Thirteen months old and he's at his second Beau's Oktoberfest.  He's Canadian, no doubt about it.)

That's about it.  We move into the new house on November 1, although we get the keys a few days before that.  We're in that middle ground of arranging to get things transferred and doing some desultory packing without really being able to pack any of the bulk of the stuff which remains, which needs to be used up until almost the last minute.  My daily commute, and particularly the slog through the middle part of Terry Fox, grates more on me than it used to.  I am eager to settle into the new space, with all the possibilities it implies.

 

Approaching One Solar Rotation

Owen turns a year old on Friday.  Think about that.  One year ago, he came into the world, socks promptly placed upon his tiny hands so that he didn't scratch himself in his quiet slumber. 

 

He's come a ways since then.

 

Walking remains an elusive but ever closer goal.  He can stand unassisted for a while, although he only usually does so when distracted, as his awareness of his ability has not kept pace with the ability itself (despite his general track record for jumping first and asking questions when he gets around to it).  When you hold his hands he will happily walk all over the house, and is more than capable of it when only one hand is held.

 

He is taller than our dining room table, which is awkward for him (as he can't stand under it anymore) and for us (as the range of things he can't reach continues to rise, and in some cases, contract).

 

He has almost all of his teeth.  The top two molars are the final additions, and both of them are showing, although they are not yet fully deployed.  He uses them with gusto, usually on food and occasionally, presumably accidentally, on his parents.

 

Talking is another skill he is working hard to develop.  He listens and understands, and he can follow requests ("Come here, no, pick up your water and come here.")  He can follow your questions and enthusiastically nod yes, or less often, happily shake his head no.  He tries to shape words but they are only intermittently recognizable.  He does have "da" and "ma" down for dad and mom, and a very enthusiastic "YUM" for food, and the enjoyment thereof.

 

He knows how to wave and does so when someone is leaving.  He figured out how to clap a week or two ago, and did so quite often for a stretch, obviously pleased with himself.  Shortly after clapping was his first successful high five, although conducting that venerable act of approval and fellowship on demand remains an elusive goal.

 

He knows well the word no, and usually listens to it, albeit not usually for long, due to his short attention span.  He knows not to go in the bathroom and is usually fairly circumspect about pushing that boundary.  He knows to be careful around the top of the stairs, to the point that we can leave the baby gate away when we need to move things downstairs, secure in the knowledge that he knows enough to be careful about it.  When he has approached the top of the stairs in the past, he has flattened himself onto his belly and crept up to peer over the edge. 

 

He can go up stairs confidently but hasn't figured out how to go down, not trusting our recommendations to go feet first.

 

He likes to play peekaboo.  We played this game with him quite often, and he has since realized that he can initiate it, whether sitting on the far side of a hallway and ducking behind the door frame, or holding Cow over his face and giggling behind it at the deception.  It's a fun game for him, one of his favourites, alongside tossing things behind him or away from himself. 

 

He is also quite interested in sorting and placing; he will place objects on the floor, then move them to a table, then onto a box, then back to the floor.  In the bath (and he loves the bath, continuing to play well after all the water is gone) he likes to put all the bath toy animals into his jug, then pulling them out again, then back in.  (Bath time is also a time for enthusiastic splashing, cloth-assisted when possible.)

 

Bedtime means story time.  He turns the pages himself, and shows every sign of delight at an old favourite.  Goodnight Moon is the reigning champion these days.  He likes to point to the objects on the page to which we are saying goodnight, or to which we will shortly be saying good night.  Recently my lovely wife noticed him sitting on the floor with one of his books, flipping through the pages and telling himself a story, playing a game of reading to himself.  I am pleased that he is learning to appreciate the virtues of a good book, even in advance of actual literacy.

 

When he goes to sleep it is usually precipitously.  He will cry and talk and chatter, on and on, and then all of a sudden, silence, like someone has flipped the switch.  He wakes up patient, willing to wait until the usual time mom and dad get up, but no longer than that, because he is a busy little man with a great deal to get done, mostly involving finding things and putting them into his mouth, and time waits for no little man.

 

In other news, house listed on Monday.  Showings Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday x2.  Conditional offer going out on the new place.  After a long period of cleaning and packing in which nothing seemed to advance and we never seemed to get anywhere, everything is suddenly happening all at once.  We are very much looking forward to being done with all of this and moved into the new place.  Uncertainty regarding my living conditions gives me stomach aches, but it's all for a good cause.  Owen won't remember any of this, of course; this house will just be pictures to him, the next one will be the house he grew up in and, one day, will leave behind.  But this will always be the house he came home to, tiny and pink and solemn, with socks upon his hands.

Language

Over the past couple of days, Owen has decided he wants in on the conversation.  The difference is very noticeable.  He has been babbling for a while, testing out his ability to make different sounds, but this is not the same. 

He's started pointing to things that he's interested in.  When he does that, we say the word.  He'll look at you and try to say it back.  Sometimes it's close, sometimes it's not, but you can tell that he's trying to reproduce the word you just said and associate it with whatever he's looking at.

He's just been doing this for the past couple of days but when he decides it's time to do something, he goes after it with all the energy and determination in the world.  It amazes me how fast his brain is developing.

His mimicry extends past language and sometimes comes out in ways you wouldn't expect.  He likes to make noises and if you make them back, he'll keep it going.  The other night he was in his bath and my lovely wife squeezed one of his bath toys, and it made a hissing noise (it's one of the plastic hollow ones with a little squirt-hole on the bottom).  Owen looked at it, scrunched up his face, and snorted air out his nose. 

His walking is progressing in a similar fashion.  He's very confident now about cruising and getting up and down from whatever objects he's going to use to stabilize himself, and he's willing to move from one to another, or to hang off of one with only one hand.  His balance is still not good at all but he's working on it every day.

He's also turned that determination to the subject of not sleeping.  Sometimes he goes down easily but sometimes he can take an hour (or two and a half) to finally give up and fall asleep.  Mom and dad are not impressed.

He's also taken to chewing on the railing of his crib.  It looks like a dog has gotten to it; he ripped all the finish off one section and got some of the wood chewed out. 

The chewing is because of his teeth, which are causing him more problems as the molars proceed, and we devoutly hope, head towards a conclusion.  His gums are quite swollen right now and he's not happy about it but with any luck he'll be done with the hard part before too long.

Meditations

Owen Update

He isn't walking yet, but he is standing with just one hand on something.  He's taking a fair number of tumbles as he figures all this out, but he keeps on going.

He really likes going into our bedroom.  He usually giggles while he crawls at full speed in that direction, like he's getting away with something.  The other day I was in the bathroom and I knew he was outside the door that goes to the living room, so I decided to go out through the other door, that goes to the bedroom, to surprise him.  He was crawling around the corner into our bedroom to catch me going out through that door.  Huge grin on his face.

Doctor Review in Progress (best to worst)

Still working my way through the great mass of Doctor Who episodes, so I really only can rank five of the eleven so far.  But this is where we are to date.

Eleventh Doctor

For all the obvious reasons.  Best companions, best stories, most interesting character.

Second Doctor

Patrick Troughton has the charm and almost childlike enthusiasm and naivete that Matt Smith brings to the role.  He comes across as being an ancient alien in a way that Hartnell can't, while still being engaging and interesting.  The awful production values aren't something you notice as much because the writing gets progressively stronger and more confident.  Also, very solid companions.  Victoria, Jamie and Zoe are all interesting and well rounded characters who add a lot to the stories through their own perspectives and personalities.  Also, none of them are from the modern era, which I like.

Tenth Doctor

There's a big gap ahead of this one, and a big gap after him.  David Tennant is all over the place.  A lot of his stories are written in the style of the Ninth, and therefore run into the silly and the absurd; when he tries to play eccentric he ends up coming across as a weirdo.  He is stronger when he's playing a bad ass, which the Ninth never did convincingly.  The writing gets better as you go along.  The thing where the Master turns him into Nobby the House Elf is just embarassing, though, so he loses a lot of points there.  Companions are a mixed bag; he inherits a lot of the Rose Tyler era but Martha is okay and I always liked Donna Noble (but then Rose is an easy act to follow).  Some really good stories, a lot of meh.

First Doctor

Amateur hour.  It's a lot like watching a stage play, people trip or flub their lines and everybody just keeps going.  The Doctor is an irritable old man who doesn't seem to really know what he's doing.  Part of this is just because they hadn't developed the mythology yet but a lot of it is that William Hartnell just doesn't bring the charm.  Also: awful, awful companions.  Susan is an idiot and Dodo is worse.  Ian and Barbara are reasonably interesting but obviously don't fit and the show suffers when they leave.

Ninth Doctor

Ugh.  Telling old-style stories without the charm.  This Doctor is tedious, somber, and frankly a bit of a spaz.  Rose Tyler manages the unimaginable feat of knocking Dodo Chaplet out of the zero rank of companions, and don't get me started on that idiot Mickey.  The episodes with Captain Jack Harkness are at least vaguely watchable but that's in spite of the Doctor, not because of him.  Weak tea.

Doctor Who

My top three perfect-world candidate list for the Twelfth Doctor:

3. Chiwetel Ejiofor

Charming, urbane, and he can bring the scary when he needs to. 

2. Anthony Stewart Head

Not as good as it would have been ten years ago, but still, he can turn on a dime from funny to dramatic and he could own the crazy uncle Doctor mode. 

1. Hugh Laurie

C'mon.  If I need to explain this one you either haven't been paying attention or you're dead inside.

Owen Addendum

My lovely wife pointed out that I missed a bunch of foodstuffs in a previous post, so I've amended it.  He's also eaten a pretty huge chunk of waffle, which he fed to himself. 

Also, today he ran into his first real Cruising Incident.  He got himself up into a standing position with the help of a 2 cubic foot cardboard box and then migrated over across the side of my desk, leaning up against the edge of it.  At that point, standing there with both palms pressed against the wood, he realized that he had no way to get down without falling over, and began to cry for help. 

It was really funny, in a way that you think probably shouldn't be funny, and yet is actually really funny.

Doctor Who

Spoilers for Name of the Doctor.

I'm just putting this here so I can be a clever dick about it later if I'm right, and assuming that it's not obvious to everyone, but in the 50 year anniversary special, we're going to find out that the Eleventh Doctor is actually the twelfth regeneration, and Ian Hurt is him from between the Eighth and Ninth, namely the one who ended the Time War by time-locking the Daleks and the Time Lords and condemning billions of people, including his own entire race, to oblivion.  That's why the Doctor doesn't consider him one of the Doctors. 

I hope that's where they are taking this because that would be awesome, and it would also explain how such a terrible, heroic, epic deed could have been done by the Eighth or Ninth Doctors, both of whom were prats.

I'm On A Boat

It's been a while since I updated on here.  The little man has blown through a number of significant milestones while I've been busy not blogging about it.  So, let's catch up.

Hair Styles

The advent of more significant hair happened very quickly.  After it came in, when he was sitting and playing, he would absent-mindedly reach up and tug at it, realizing that there was something new up there.

It's usually a light brown colour, but sometimes it looks darker, and sometimes it looks very blonde, and sometimes it looks full-out ginger copper red.  I couldn't tell you where it will end up.

Diet

So far we've gone through apples, peaches, bananas and pears, yams, beans, carrots, peas, butternut squash (yum!) and creamed corn.  He really likes yams and squash and he enjoys bananas as long as they're fresh.  You can give him a pretty hefty hunk of banana, one small chunk at a time, and he'll happily stuff it down.

We give him cheerios with some meals.  He hasn't mastered the pincer-grip so he grabs them awkwardly with his whole fist and then tries to get the whole thing into his mouth.  He can be surprisingly effective with this approach.  Sometimes he will start off by rounding up all the cheerios on his tray and collecting them all into his hands, until he's holding all of them, at which point he will realize that there is no way to eat them in that state.

More recently we've gotten him started with chicken.  He likes real chicken, and real beef, but the baby-food chicken is another thing altogether.  I can't say I blame him as it smells quite unpleasant.  He still makes terrible faces when you first give it to him, and he will usually proceed from faces, to reluctance, to outright refusal.  We sometimes mix in other things with the chicken to try to get them down him.

The other day we finished the chicken and went for the next course, which was beans.  My lovely wife held the spoon of beans before his resolutely closed mouth; then he caught a whiff of the odour, realized it wasn't chicken, and opened his mouth as wide as I've ever seen.

Tooth Grinding

Owen grinds his teeth.  It makes a pretty awful noise.  I don't know why he does it and I can't think of a way to discourage it.

Mobility

Owen has mastered the crawl. 

His first forays into mobility involved squirming around on his belly, and sometimes rolling.  He then worked up to pushing up with his arms and flopping forward.  From there he mastered the crawling position, and then would either glide forward, Sun Salute style, or push up into a pike (bear crawl style) and wiggle his bum in the air, uncertain of how to proceed.  My lovely wife suspects that he was actually trying to stand up when he did this.

Once he worked out the mechanics of proper crawling, he was off like a rocket.  He now crawls all over the place and baby gates have duly been deployed.

He can get up to a standing position if he has something to hold onto, and he can conduct the operation they refer to as 'cruising', in which he moves around while holding onto nearby objects of furniture for balance.  In his activity table he can, and often does, push himself all the way around its perimeter in endless loops.

He will often greet us in the morning in his crib, having lifted himself up to a kneeling position, with both hands and a smiling face peeking out over the railing.

Social Conditioning

Owen is doing a good job of learning to listen.  Usually when you tell him 'no', he listens.  Sometimes he chooses not to.  Often he will be distracted and then get distracted back to the first thing, and will have forgotten.  Still, it's pretty impressive.

A while ago my lovely wife was up with him in the morning and I was still abed, engaged in being a slothful layabout, as one does.  Owen gave out a very loud LAAAAAAA sound.  My lovely wife said, "Shhhhh, daddy's sleeping."  Owen responded with a very soft, "laaaaaaaa ..."

Nautical Affairs

Owen recently took part in his first sail.

This was generally considered to be a success, although he was not entirely in favour of the idea.  The principal objection involves the life jacket that he is obliged to wear; it is large and not particularly well suited to the types of mobility he presently has at his disposal.  There is also not as much to see, in terms of the sorts of things he likes to look at, such as bright colours, loud noises, and large moving objects. 

He is, however, a natural.  Sitting on my lap, when the boat would heel with the wind, he'd quietly adjust his position, leaning into it as you are supposed to do.  He can't yet walk but he already has his sea legs.

Yams!

Yams!

Owen is eating Yams now.  He really didn't like them at first; there is some epic video of the event on my video camera.  But even when he's making disgusted, pitiful faces, he still continues to eat, and it appears that he's coming around to the idea.

Cereal Time

Owen loves his cereal.  He likes rice but he's crazy for oats and barley.  When he gets put in his chair and he sees you getting it together, he grins and kicks his feet in anticipation.  You can't feed it to him fast enough; you give him some and by the time you look up from loading up your spoon again, he's sitting there with his mouth open.

He used to want to use the spoon himself but I think he's figured out that this is not an optimal way of getting oats into the Owen belly.  Now he mostly just wants to play with it once the bowl is empty.

The other day my lovely wife was getting his oats ready and he was playing with a dish-and-ball toy.  He looked up and saw that she was ready with the oats, so he put his toy down and pushed it away: time for Oats.

Sleeping

His four molars are almost in.  It's been a very difficult period.  He's been very prone to bad rashes throughout this teething experience and his feeding and sleeping have been impacted.  And, of course, whenever his schedule goes off the rails, mom and dad pay for it in lost sleep.  But the situation appears to be improving and he only has 4 more teeth to go once these are done (for a while, anyway).

Mobility

Still no real crawling, although his pseudo-crawling shuffle allows him significant mobility.  He's able to get into crawling position and hold it for a while now.  Sometimes he'll get there and then rock back and forth, as if winding up to launch, but he doesn't do much more than a forward-flop from there.

He still loves to stand and is basically capable of doing so by himself if he has something to hold onto.  You can also hold his hands and walk him around; he's got the mechanics down and can do it the length of the house.  We've already begun planning for baby-gates.

Toys 

• Radio music player.  I think it's an iPod but my lovely wife disagrees.  Probably his favourite portable toy.
• Stuffed dog.
• Stuffed monkey.
• Cow, for bedtime.
• Inflated Penguin.  Wobbles and makes funny noises. 
• Square, filled with noises and mirrors and rattles and stuff.
• Other stuffed monkey.
• Boba Fett sock monkey, which he really likes.
• Huge inflated roller thingie.
• Light up musical tablet.
• Rattle-balls, three varieties of colour and size.
• Giant musical activity table, about which he gets so excited you wouldn't believe it.
• The basket in which all of his toys are kept.
• Wiggles the giant pig.
• His mobile, which still makes him so happy when you turn it on.

Acuity

They say that at his age, he doesn't have much of a memory.  I don't buy it.  He anticipates things that he's done before and can clearly remember things that happened to him.  When he's got a bad diaper rash he really doesn't like going to the change table because it hurt before.  When his teeth are hurting he can recognize the tylenol and knows it'll help.  And he gets so excited when the Oats are ready.

Also, because I was wondering, his eyes are much better than mine were.  He can see and recognize his mom when she's getting out of a car in the driveway and we're all the way up in the kitchen. 

Still no idea if he'll be a lefty or a righty but my money is on lefty.

Hair continues to come in very quickly; the change is noticeable day to day.  So far mostly blonde but trending in a brown direction.

Impediments

Trying Health Problems and All the Fun They Cause

We took Owen to Calgary.  The plane rides were generally fine; he slept through takeoffs and landings and spent a lot of time making new friends and flirting with the ladies.

Owen developed various illnesses once we were there which he is just now getting over.  Our return was a gruelling exercise in sleep deprivation.  The final tally at the resulting doctor's visit was a head cold, an ear infection, and a cough which may be due to a cold and may be due to asthma.  He's responded well to the inhalers and so far so good.

Since then his lungs are sounding better and his ear is clearing up, but he's developed a nasty diaper rash that won't go away, and he isn't sleeping the way he usually does.  All of it adds up to tired looking parents, but none of it is putting a dent in his good humour.

Owen's New Laugh

Owen has a new laugh.

He's always had the one laugh, spontaneous and wide-eyed and boisterous.  His new laugh appeared abruptly and it's quite different.  He wrinkles his nose and squints a bit, gives a wide grin, and makes a HEE HEE HEH kind of sound.  Most interestingly, this is quite clearly a deliberate laugh.  He does it in anticipation of things.  His original laugh is what you get when you surprise him; the new one is for times when he's in on the joke.

It's adorable.

Mobility Management

He'll be crawling soon. 

Already he can get into a pushup position from his knees.  He's able to move himself around fairly well on his belly by pushing up with his arms and then rolling forward or flopping to the side.  He's working on getting his knees up but he hasn't yet quite figured out that he can get his knees under him when he's up on his arms.

I give it a matter of weeks until he's crawling at will, and not many weeks either.

As concerns walking, he is able to carry out the walking movements if you are holding his hands, and he can keep himself standing if he has a ledge to hold onto.

Water

He's getting a lot more out of bath-time these days.  He's figured out that splashing is fun.  When we first started bathing him we needed to give him a wet cloth over his chest to keep him warm, but he's dispensed with that now; he's quite content to just sit there and play.

There are plans afoot to get him into a pool.  This should not be entirely surprising to anyone who has met his mother.

Give Peas a Chance

We tried adding peas to his food repetoire, after oats and barley.  He eats them, but the looks he was giving when he first tried them were epic.  I got it all on video.  We are putting the peas on hold due to an unexplained rash, but neither of us really think the peas are causally responsible.

I don't think Owen necessarily minds a cessation in the peas offensive.

Other Stuff

I got my wisdom teeth out.  I was under for an hour and a half, sleepy and bleeding everywhere for a day (seriously, at one point it looked like someone had been knifed in our bathroom), and unable to eat solid food for a week and a half.  The swelling wasn't too bad and my lovely wife's amazing repetoire of outstanding soups kept me going, supplemented by the occasional DQ treat.  I'm now back to eating real food, waiting for the stitches to fall out, and getting used to the rearrangement in the landscape of my mouth.

Overall, it pretty much sucked and I can't say I recommend it.

Big Man

The little man is now well capable of sleeping through the night, although getting him used to not getting his soother back if he loses it partway through the night is still a work in progress.  He continues to sleep in almost as long as mom and dad do, and when he wakes up closer to 7 than 8, he's usually content to hang out in his crib and talk to himself until we come and get him.  For a not-quite-six-month-old, he is surprisingly accommodating regarding requests to please, please just let mom and dad get another twenty minutes of sleep.  He's a naturally happy and accommodating little guy.

Owen's introduction to solid foods has been a smashing success.  After we had gotten past the hiccup around rice cereal and his mysterious rash, and moved on to first oats and then barley cereal, he was off and running.  The first few attempts were mostly just a big mess but we (and by we, I mean my lovely wife) have figured out ways to get the food delivered, and Owen has figured out how to eat it with only a small quantity finding its way onto his chin, forehead, cheeks, bib, and chair.  He eats with all signs of relish but I don't know if that's due to taste, texture, or just a satisfied desire to eat the way mommy and daddy eat.

We've recently started giving him water in a real (plastic) cup.  This, too, he's figured out quite quickly, although he spills as much water as he drinks.

Owen's a big boy already.  He's in the mid-ninetieth percentile for length and almost eighty for weight.  He's bigger than kids four months older than him.  When my Aunt saw five-month-old him she thought he was two months older than that.  He's huge.  It really strikes me when I look at older pictures of him.  My lovely wife has a curved glass picture of him with Pooh Bear in his car seat and it's amazing how much smaller he was then.  He doesn't even fit in that car seat anymore.

Sitting upright on his own is now a skill in his repertoire.  He can do it for quite a while, before gradually starting to sink to one side.  He can sometimes throw out an arm to stop himself but then is mechanically unable to right himself, with his disproportionately large cranium.   He takes this situation in stride and trusts that mom or dad will help him shortly.

His motor control is much better than it used to be, as well.  He's gone from flailing in the general direction of things he wants to carefully reaching for them and manipulating them.  When we give him the blue rubber teething butterfly he can pick it up and keep its wings in good chewing position.  When playing with his rattle-ball, sitting on the chair, he figured out that he could toss it up to but not beyond the edge of the seat cushion and it would roll back to him, and then did that for a while before getting bored with it.

It's hilarious to me how much smoother his motions are when he's asleep, or falling asleep.  He normally sleeps with a blanket on him and Cow, with a stuffed-animal head and a soft blanket body, at his side.  When he's falling asleep and you give him Cow he wraps his arm around it gently and exactly.  Sometimes we go in and see him sleeping on his side, cuddled up with Cow.  Sometimes he grabs the blanket-part of it and pulls it over his face, or ends up with a Cow-hat.

A lot of that fine motor control is dedicated to the pursuit of independence, for Owen is already a very independent little boy.  When he gets his vitamin D drops, he wants to grab the dropper and manage it himself.  When he's eating, he wants to hold the spoon and feed himself.  The look of satisfaction he gets when he's lying one way and manages to roll over, without needing someone to flip him, is sublime.

Once he figures out how to walk we're going to be in some real trouble.