The Ant and the Grasshoppers

We had our first snowfall of the year the day before Thanksgiving, which we could enjoy since we weren’t traveling in it.  On Thanksgiving then, while Sean was slaving away in the kitchen making his glorious (truly! It was a masterpiece!) feast, Owen and I got bundled up:

Then we headed outside and made ourselves a miniature snowman.  Here he is when he was just the basics:

And then I went inside and stole a carrot from the chef to use as a nose.  So here he is with fancy nose yet still no arms:

 

The carrot nose was a big hit with Owen—he talked about that for a long time.  The stick arms were a big hit with Dorothy, and we had a hard time keeping her from stealing them and chewing them to bits.

And while Sean was cooking and Owen, Dorothy, and I were winter-wonderlanding, Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum were upstairs thusly:

Muddy Puddles

For the last four or five months, Owen has been, to put it mildly, a big fan of the Peppa Pig cartoon.  One of Peppa’s favorite activities, proper little piggy that she is, is to jump in muddy puddles.  And she is often getting admonished – and in turn admonishing her little brother, George – that if you jump in muddy puddles, you must wear your boots.

Owen has been quite intrigued by the whole idea of muddy puddles and jumping into them, and I finally got him a pair of rainboots so that he could do just that.  We had the boots, and now we needed the puddles!  “Luckily” (and please sprinkle a bit of sarcasm on that), our neighbors decided to drain their broken swimming pool on Sunday, and didn’t let the hose run out far enough into the lot that backs up onto both of our yards.  I was outside in the backyard with Owen at the time, when all of a sudden I realized that there was a steady stream of water running into it.  After hollering politely to the neighbor that his pool was ending up in our yard and could he please do something about it, we decided to make lemonade, so to speak, and I got Owen his rainboots.

Thus proceeded a good hour of muddy puddle jumping!  And it was just as much fun as Peppa had described.  Owen kept saying, Mommy jump in muddy puddles, too? Upon which I reminded him that if you jump in muddy puddles, you must wear your boots, and I was not wearing my boots.  Alas!  But Owen had a lot of fun, and by the next morning the puddles had been absorbed into our yard, as puddles are wont to do.

The Mosquito Buffet Is Closed

We have had many days with weather in the sixties as of late, which means that we can finally spend time outside without becoming a mosquito buffet.  It seems very freeing.  No smelly bug spray that doesn’t really work, and no looking down to find mosquitoes polka-dotting my legs.

When it stopped raining this past weekend I went outside with Owen and Dorothy and enjoyed watching the birds and occasionally pulling a weed while keeping an eye on Owen and his antics.  We have a little faded slide thingie that neighbors down the street passed on to us, and Owen enjoys climbing up it and sliding down while informing me that I am too big for the slide.  Yes Owen, I am indeed. 

He also can spend a very long time puttering about the yard, gathering sticks, and throwing pebbles in bushes and generally doing a good job of keeping himself entertained.  And of course the whole time he is doing so he is also making a running commentary that is often quite amusing.

And Dorothy loves nothing better than to be out in her yard with people on a cool day!  She takes a few big sticks and brings them under our largest tree and lies down and chews them.  

Every once in awhile she will bring a stick over to us to show us that she is a dog with a big stick.  She also likes to whip around and thwack us in the ankles with them.  And then she’ll return happily to underneath her tree.

We’re still trying to keep her from doing too much running and jumping, as she will get limpy after a session in the yard in which she is too active.  

This is precisely what she is not supposed to do:

She went on a neighborhood watch walk the other day and some policemen drove by, and then stopped when they saw her neighborhood watch bandanna so that they could meet their newest deputy!  They gave Dorothy much admiration, and she was very, very proud.  She has yet to report any suspicious activity, but that doesn’t mean she is not looking for it!

A Win/Win Situation

I am unduly pleased with myself because I did a bit of weeding in the front yard on Sunday.  Seriously, I’m as bad as Owen, who likes nothing more than to plunk a leaf in the bag and proclaim proudly, “Weeding!”  But I was outside with Owen for the umpteenth time, and getting a little bored of watching him flick water from a bucket with a paint brush, so started removing obvious weeds from our flowerbeds.  And it was very satisfying!  I was tidying the yard!  And I love to tidy.  There were a few moments where I had to stop because I wasn’t sure if a plant was a legal resident or an imposter, but on the whole, I was able to significantly improve one small square foot or two of our front yard.

It didn’t hurt any that I had a very enthusiastic helper in Owen, too, who once he saw what I was doing, decided he would take each weed that I plucked and run it down the driveway to where his bucket was.  I didn’t bother suggesting to him that he bring the bucket closer, because I figured it was a good way to tire him out; and indeed he ran down the driveway to his bucket and back at least twenty times.  I know fifteen minutes of weeding does not a gardener make, but it was the first time that it occurred to me that gardening could be something in actuality that I enjoyed doing, and not just in very fuzzy theory.

I knew not to weed this:

I was also able to get Owen to walk almost around the whole block on Sunday, which is a pretty good distance.  He walked halfway around so that we could go look at the school buses where they are parked; I carried him up the hill, and then he walked the rest of the way on his own accord, albeit with numerous stops and starts.  A toddler walks a lot like a puppy:  he squats to look at a stick, and then picks it up and moseys for a bit while examining the stick; then hits a few things with the stick; and then all of a sudden will start running out of the blue until  he reaches something else that grabs his attention.

He likes to say “hi!” and “Bye-bye” to anyone who might be out in their yard, although he also will get a little tongue-tied should they want to have a longer conversation.  If he is feeling really shy, he will hide his head in my legs, but sometimes he will chat, too.  You can never quite tell how shy Owen will be, if at all.

Not shy at all while shaking his booty 

to a musical card in the Rite Aid:

Trying To Run Owen Ragged

Three Sundays ago, Owen took a long nap on me, and didn’t wake until I insisted he get off me at 3:30.  Because that is a good deal later than he usually naps, we decided to take him to the nearby lacrosse field, not in use on Sundays, to tire him out.  This was more difficult than I had thought it would be, since although he was happy to cover all four corners of the vast field, his idea of the perfect such tour was up in my arms while I hoofed it hither and thither across the greenery.

So I finally had to put him down and then run from him to get him to jog after me.  He found a stick and that made him happy. 

We Deserve It

We’ve had great weather on the weekends lately – sunny and in the sixties, which is my idea of perfect, and after the winter we had, I do think we deserve this nice goldilocks climate.  It is also so much easier to tire out a toddler when said toddler can spend hours outside (although really, he tends to run more in the supermarket or Target; outside he likes to focus on sticks or pebbles and just sort of moseys about).

But it is nice these days, which are still pre-mosquito, to have the back yard as an option in which Owen can mosey and I can follow behind as he does so.  Often while we are being aimless, Sean is busy doing yard and garden work.  He was moving some of the many flowers in our front yard to our back, and Owen came up to him and started a frenzy of greeting:  he kept saying, Hi Dada! Hi Dada! over and over, and even when Sean repeatedly said hi back, the repetition continued.  Finally we realized his “Hi Dada” really meant, “What are you doing?”  And so when we told him what Sean was doing, he said “Yes” as if he had known all along, and then a few seconds later wanted us to tell him all over again.  Asking and hearing the same answer seems to be how Owen processes information these days.

Owen and I played a lot of peekaboo:

In addition to hiding behind a skinny tree, he also stood in the middle of the yard and covered his eyes with his hands, and then cackled wildly when I would ask where Owen was.  That never gets old, apparently.

Dorothy often gets barked at by two little dogs who live next door, and she generally ignores them and does not bark back, although now Owen will imitate the sound of the two little dogs guarding their perimeter.  Dorothy did bark at me to try to get me to play with her and the large stick she had found, and eventually Owen started imitating this too.  So now when we all go outside, the two neighbor dogs start to shriek, Dorothy will bark at her stick, and Owen will start answering Dorothy with a Woo(f) Woo(f).

It’s not a quiet place, our yard.

Owen at 19 Months

Owen has a new dance, in case you were wondering.  It looks a little like this:

No, that is not a video, just a picture.  But it is pretty much what he does.  Stand there and lift his feet in tiny baby steps up and down.  Sometimes he will turn, and the whole time he is dancing he usually has a very cute smile on his face.  So there is that, but he has yet to really bust a move.

He is really on the verge of speaking in "sentences", or saying more than one word and a string of gibberish.  The other day we were in the kitchen, and he began to, well, poop, and as he often does while pooping, he will say the word, Poop.  But then he realized that I was standing right there, and might just sweep him up and off to get his diaper changed -- an activity he is Very Much Not Fond Of.  So after saying Poop, he quickly looked at me and said, No, Mama!

His little sentence was all to no avail, since I indeed said yes, and then did the dreaded diaper changing.  But although the sentence was not obeyed, it still was spoken!  And was rather cute.

He also says a lot of "Hiyas" while lifting his foot in a karate kick motion to imitate Dad.  And his other favorite thing is to drop or knock something on to the floor, and then put his head to his hand in mock dismay and say, "Oh man!"  I tend to point out to him that you don't get to say Oh Man if the knocking over was done on purpose, but I suppose I am just raining on his parade with that one.

Owen is also very much enjoying going outside on the warm days we have had here and there peppered amongst the snowy ones.  Here he is on just such a warm day a few Saturdays ago, enjoying destroying the leaf pile Sean was trying to rake.

It doesn't look too springy yet, does it?!  Alas.  Although we do have about two inches of crocuses and daffodils starting to come up in the front.  And I will take what I can get!

Owen Outside

Owen does love to swing, and now that he can walk, there's a few other things he can do on the playground as well.

But when it comes to the great out of doors, he is not a one-note kind of fellow.  For example, he loves scuffling through the leaves:

He's fond of exploring the flora and fauna of his own backyard, plus poking the grass with sticks:

He'll sit down splat on the driveway and entertain himself with bits of the crumbling asphalt:

He loves to walk up our deck stairs and then play with the seeds and bits of leaves that can be found there:

He is not above doing a little repair on his car now and then:

And I can't convey to you how much time he can spend carrying rocks to the picnic table bench and then throwing them off:

He is definitely a budding outdoorsman.

Although he gets tired of being found and followed by a certain paparazza: