Owen at Twenty-Two Months

Owen turned 22 months on the 8^th and it is really a fun age.  He has tantrums, which are tiring, and he’s been torturing us with a sleep regression, but on the whole he is just so enthusiastic and excited and earnest.  He talks non-stop, although not in language an outsider would really recognize, but I feel like he will be speaking in sentences quite soon.

He’s also very aware of sounds that he hears; we can hear a train whistle from our house, and whenever he hears the whistle he will start chugga chugga choo-chooing.  He wants to know what everything is and what we are doing.  Nothing excites him more than if we are out in the yard and Sean starts doing a yard project.  He then will want to know every step of the project and what he can do to help.  Sean was pruning our various trees and bushes in the back yard the other day (we have an ivy and an invasive clinging weed that we have long been trying to rid the yard of.  It is slow going.  Sean clipped a tendril that had been strangling part of our elderberry bushes and we witnessed the bushes sighing in relief).  Anyway, Owen was helping by picking up all the branches and sticks and putting them in the collection bag, and loving every minute of it.  It was also something he could do that was actually helpful, although we did have to make sure that he didn’t put all of Dorothy’s yard toys in the bag….

He also seems to have inherited his father’s sense of humor.  We have tiny ants which appear in our windowsills and then work as a team to try to steal our sugar, and Owen will point at them and say buh for bug.  Now he will do that with my freckles too—point at them and say buh.  I say “I certainly hope not!” and he thinks that’s funny.  He will point at a freckle, say “bug,” and then say “not a bug,” and crack himself up.

Owen is still an extremely picky eater, and we generally do what all the books say and put foods on his tray in the hope that one day he will eat them.  And sometimes he does, but I’ve stopped getting excited about it, as he usually then won’t eat them the next time they are offered.  He is a big fan of corn on the cob now, although he doesn’t understand how to eat it off the cob himself – he keeps sticking the stem end in his mouth and then making a face.  He loves dessert, of course, and can say “cake” quite clearly.  That’s my boy.

Here he is buzzing like a bee: