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:

The Meadow at Bulldogge Manor

One of the previous owners of our house was a gardener, and had arranged the front yard so that one half of it was all flowering plants and no grass whatsoever.  When you look at our house, the left side is a beautiful old (I think flowering cherry?) tree, and the right side is the side of flowers.  I think she was going for a kind of wild meadow/English garden look, but either she didn’t quite succeed, or the stroke that she had in her last few years in the house made her unable to get the garden into the shape she had envisioned. 

Here's the house from the front with branches flowering:

Here's plants that grow underneath the tree:

So the side that is all flowers is pretty, but it is also a bit of a mess.  My father the master gardener has confirmed that her design has problems, to put it nicely.  It basically looks like a bomb went off in a smorgasbord:  there will be flowers of one variety scattered all over with no rhyme or reason, and then one lily, say, in the middle of a patch of bleeding hearts.  Then of course choking all the flowers is a tangle of weeds and ivy, and since Sean and I have little time to garden (and I have yet to learn how to do so), as of late the weeds seem to be winning.

Here you can see the right side with flowers and plants and weeds in a muddle:

Now I should make two disclosures here:  the first is that when we got the house, I had agreed to be in charge of the front yard garden.  And I was excited about that!  I’ve never gardened, but I enjoy other peoples’ efforts, and I always thought it would be something I’d like to learn someday.  Well, that someday is still in the future.  For when we moved into the house I was seven months pregnant and since then, I haven’t had time to spend on the hobbies I already enjoyed, yet alone learn new ones.  My second disclosure is that my garden slothdom, such as it is, isn’t shared by Sean, who works hard every weekend on the numerous yard tasks that accrue during the week.

Of course, while he is doing so, I am watching Owen, so there is a reason I’m not gardening in the front.  But all this is to say that our front yard garden – messy to begin with – became even more so last summer due to neglect.  At one point we had someone come in and give us a quote to see how much it would cost for them to turn the right side back into a yard and move a lot of the flowers into contained beds by the front porch.  And doctor our beautiful tree a bit.  But the quote was about three times as high as we had expected, so there went that idea.

Sean thus decided that this spring and summer he would start to organize the yard himself.  He’s moved a lot of the flowers from the front yard to the back; made endless trips to pick up free community mulch; moved some of the flowers to a new bed by the porch; gotten rid of a pebbled path that wound its way through the plants, and has also tried to keep the weeds and ivy at bay.  It’s going to take all season, and perhaps two, but eventually we hope to have a patch of lawn where the weeds currently are, and a bit of space where once there was meadow.  Here are some pictures of what we are dealing with:

This is a pretty yellow flowering bush of some sort that grows up intertwined

with an evergreen tree.  It looks nice, so we will leave it alone:

So that is that.  We have some work to do, but there is not really any huge rush.  I forgot to mention that also underneath the tree on the left side is a nice azalea pathway that leads to our house.  Here it is in bloom:

It is fun seeing what comes up where.  This year, we had a beautiful purple flower that I hadn't noticed last year.  I took a picture of it to show my boss, who is also a good gardener, and she tells me it is spiderwort.  It sounds so nicely witchy!  We shall definitely keep this one, but might move it to a different, less central, locale (it's smack in the middle of the yard at the moment).

A New Sand Table

Owen’s Granny and Grandfather gave him an early birthday gift so that he could enjoy it over the next few months:  a sand and water table.  You are supposed to put sand on one side of it and water on the other and let the playing begin.  (We did this, although I had to keep my OCD in check when Owen of course wanted to just dump all the sand into the water side and vice versa, ending up with two sides of muck.)

Here he is enjoying the table (the color of the accompanying umbrella makes it look like our house has a big splotch of mold on it; this is not the case.)

However, the next morning when I opened the cover (which also has a track for cars!), the water from the right had somehow drained into the sand on the left.  I have no idea how this was possible, but nonetheless, the water was mostly gone and the sand was damp.  So I decided to just put sand on the right side too and have both sides be sand—at least for now.  I figure we can always change it back.

Owen likes his sand table very much, and has already had a few meltdowns when I made him come in because the mosquitoes were attacking.  I spend a good amount of time when I am watching him use it telling him to stop dumping the sand out of the box, but it is mostly to no avail:  apparently dumping sand out of a sandbox causes paroxysms of pleasure, mess be damned.

Sand pie anyone?

Holiday Weekend

We took Owen to the Philadelphia Zoo for the first time on Memorial Day weekend.  We ended up getting a yearly membership, since supposedly if you go more than twice a year you pay more than the membership costs, so it seemed like a good deal.  Plus it is really quite a fine city zoo, and very child-oriented, as the hordes (and hordes and hordes—really, if you are pedophobic, don’t come to this zoo) of toddlers and their parents can attest.

Zoo pictures by Sean:

It was a little hard to tell just how much Owen enjoyed it – a lot of the animals are of course towards the back of their enclosures, so I wasn’t always sure if Owen was seeing them or not.  For example, he was very excited to see the giraffes, but then I realized he was staring at some giraffe statues outside of the pen and not the three giraffes eating leaves in the back.

He enjoyed a few monkeys, the polar bear, a camel, and a rhinoceros, but his favorite was definitely a statue of a bear that had water coming out of his mouth.  He played with the water for a long time before I carried him off all liquid-boned and in major hissy fit mode.

Owen actually seemed most excited when we said it was time to go.  Then as we pushed him in the stroller on our way out he said goodbye to everyone he saw.  Perhaps he was overwhelmed by the crowds?  At any rate, I think he will enjoy his second visit more.

The next day we went to a wee Memorial Day parade in a nearby town and Owen liked that very much, especially the marching band and the marching bagpipe band.  Here he is looking patriotic:

Owen is all about cars and trucks right now, so he was also excited when the fire trucks went by....

Sandals!

Today is supposed to reach 90 degrees, so Owen is wearing his new sandals for the first time.  Doesn’t he look spiffy?  Those fat legs were meant for shorts. 

He's clapping for himself here:

We took him to Stride Rite on Saturday so that he could get his feet measured, and it was Not Easy, since he was not in a cooperative mood.  Of course it didn’t help that the shop attendant was rather slow with the measuring, so missed the five-second window in which Owen was willing to keep his foot still.  He wears a size 7: his once dinner rolls are now clodhoppers.

Owen really isn’t at all interested in clothes or shoes or what is put on his person, even if, say, it’s a shirt with an animal on it that will usually get him excited in other contexts.  Like his father, he is not a fashionista, which I suppose is a good thing as it means I’ll be able to put him in clothes that I like.

For the record, Sean is not a fan of these sandals (or any sandals), and kept saying that Owen looked like a Republican, and called him “Jeb.”  Regardless, I think I shall also get Owen a pair of saltwater sandals to have as a back-up.

Here he is in a different pair of shorts on another hot day last week.

A Whistle Pig or a Woodcharlene?

I’ve been enjoying the little tubby presence of our backyard woodchuck.  He’s out a lot in the evenings chomping on our grass, and at the slightest sound will run back to his den underneath our shed, his rolls of fat rippling as he skedaddles.  He’ll also sit up like a prairie dog and sniff for signs of danger.

Our neighbors told me that there is a difference between a groundhog and a woodchuck, and what we had was a groundhog, but I looked it up and they were wrong.  A groundhog and a woodchuck are the same beast and are occasionally known as a whistle pig, since they will whistle to alert other woodchucks of impending danger!  Now I want to hear our guy whistle!

One article I read also pointed out that a woodchuck has nothing to do with wood (and therefore a female is NOT a woodcharlene, much though that made me snicker); their name comes from “wuchak” which is what the Algonquins and Narragansetts called them.

Although this article admonished the reader for wanting to call a female a woodcharlene, the author did say that it was correct to refer to a male as a he-chuck and a female as a she-chuck.  However, since I have no idea what the gender of our tenant is, that doesn’t help me much.  I’m keeping an eye out for the appearance of cubs, which would clue me into realizing my moppet is a she-chuck.  But then I’d worry about Dorothy getting ahold of a cub, and whereas Dorothy doesn’t seem to have a big prey drive, I don’t want to put that to the test with a little brown bundle of furbaby. 

In the meantime I am enjoying peeking out my window in the evenings and watching the fellow enjoy his salad.

Hooray!

Owen is very into cheering these days.  He will raise both hands in the air and triumphantly say, "I did it!" or he will clap and cheer.  When I walk down the stairs in the morning or after changing out of my work clothes, he claps and cheers.  When Sean sings him the spiderman theme song, he claps and cheers.  When we read him his favorite book, Little Owl Lost, he claps and cheers when Little Owl is reunited with his mother.

He’s an enthusiastic fellow.  The other thing he is these days is chatty.  We go on a lot of walks with Owen in the bugaboo (he is pro-walk at the moment), and just in the last week these walks have become filled with non-stop questions.  He points to every car and bird he sees and will query, “Car?” “Truck?” “Bird?” And answering with a simple “yes” will not do; I have to instead say, “Yes, a white car.” “You’re right, that’s a big truck.” “Yes, the bird is looking for worms to eat.” “Yes, that is water; it’s a puddle.” Etc., etc.  He wants a full conversation.

He also likes to test to see if the Don’t Step On The Flowers rule is still in place (it always is).  He will pantomime stepping on the daffodils by raising his foot up high above them and looking at me, and when I say, “Don’t step on the daffodils!” He says something about daffodils, although his version of the word has 10-20 syllables and is something like “daff dum dilly dilly do doobie daff doobie….”

I overheard this conversation the other day between Sean and Owen while they were watching Curious George:

Owen:  [laughing loudly Ho Ho Ho!]

Owen:  What’s that?

Sean:  A KITTY!

Owen:  Yes!

Owen enjoys laughing heartily, and will join in with strangers if they should laugh anywhere near him in a store.  He has a fake jovial laugh he reserves for such hilarity:  Ho Ho Ho!  A laughter drive-by, if you will.