La-Lu

For the last several weeks at least, and no, I cannot believe I didn't record the very first moment that he said this...Owen has been saying "Love you" to us. I think the very, very first time was to Daddy as he walked out the door sometime around Christmas. And it usually sounds like La-lu, although sometimes it comes closer to Luh You. It really is the sweetest thing to hear. The other night I rocked him to sleep (or what I thought was very close to it), and then I gently put him in his crib and walked to the door, and as I opened the door to leave his room I heard him whisper "La-lu". I had to stop myself from walking right back and picking him up and holding him all night. Instead, I just whispered "I love you too" and smiled all the way downstairs.

The other very noticeable change is that Owen is identifying us as a family unit. It's really not like I ever felt like he didn't feel a part of us, but all of the sudden it has really, truly hit him that we are a family. Now, over and over, all day long he says Mommy, Daddy, Huhm (Liam) and Nahlee (Natalie). If we are there he will point to us and say our names, and if someone is missing he will ask about them. When Liam is at school he asks where he is, and the same with Natalie. And he loves going to pick them up from school. At night he makes sure to find every one of us for a kiss. He just seems much more secure with his place right now, and it is so wonderful to see. For quite a while now, when we rock at night Owen would pat me and call me Mama at first, and now Mommy. Recently he has been patting me and saying Mommy, then saying "baby" and I'll say "Yes, I'm your Mommy and you're my baby." then we'll repeat that several times and then he will snuggle in with a sigh, visibly relaxing. La-lu, little man, La-lu.

Dold

Interesting new habit.
And everytime I catch him like this he has just one word for me: "Dold."
Perhaps we made a mistake in saying, when we would catch him doing this particular thing, "Owen, what are you doing, digging for gold?!"
Now, he just leaves the finger in and says very seriously, "Dold, Mommy, dold."

I shudder to think what will go through his mind during the Olympics with all the athletes competing for the Gold.

Why Discipline Will Be a Problem

I like to have Owen make pretend faces now. This is what we get when I ask him to "make a mad face" - although it does get a little more ferocious than this sometimes, and he puts his head down even lower and looks up through those wrinkled eyebrows.



But I ask you - how am I supposed to discipline this boy when even his "mad" face is so completely irresistible? And luckily for me, he usually cracks himself up when he makes this face and so two seconds later I get his happy, giggly face. Love this age.

Too Long?

Has it been too long since I have ironed any clothes when I pull out the ironing board and Natalie asks, bewildered, "What is that?!"

And then I pull out the iron and she giggles like I've just produced an ancient torture device (what a minute...I think I have..) and demands, "And what is THAT!?!"

To be fair, if I ever ironed it was usually when the kids were asleep because I didn't want to deal with the whole issue of child pulling on the cord or me being clumsy and someone ending up with an iron on their head (which did come close to happening when Liam was very little). But to be even more fair, the near-miss incident was probably when Jim was ironing, because he is the only one who ever really irons around here. Now I just take his dress shirts to the drycleaner, and everything else we wear wrinkled. I have absolutely no issues with wearing clothes that look like they have been wadded up for weeks in a laundry basket without being folded. No qualms whatsoever.

In fact, the only reason I was ironing this time is because I was taking clothes to the resell shop. Yes, I will iron clothes for other people to buy them, but I won't iron them for my family to wear. With a few of Natalie's dresses it even occurred to me how nice they looked after being ironed. Hmm. Guess that would have looked good on her. Oh well. Of course, it did make me doubly frustrated when the resell shop only took 1/3 of the clothes. I was digging through their rejects to see if anyone of them were ironed, meaning I wasted precious minutes ironing - how awful would that be.

I've been in the mood to purge this year, and have also been listing things on Craigs List quite successfully. I'm starting to get addicted to that feeling. Getting rid of clutter AND making some money. Woo-hoo. The only downside is that this inadvertently introduced JIM to Craigs List. Silly me, when he asked me how it worked, I thought maybe he had some things to sell too. No, turns out he wanted to look up baseball bats for Liam. So now for every $ I make selling something, I have to worry that Jim is in the next room buying things. The man was born to run a sports equipment resell shop. He just loves all sports equipment, whether we need it or not. I told him I was OK with it as long as 1) he gets a good deal, and 2) the net/net of Craigs List is that we make money not spend it.

Dinos Revisited

Giddy'up dino!

Mom, I still don't like them...

Raaahhrr!

Almost two years ago we made this trip to see the robotic dinosaurs. Natalie was 2 and terrified. So I was curious to see Owen's reaction this year. I may have mentioned before that he is generally pretty fearless, unless you are talking about dogs (and this fear may be almost gone now) and small animals (the picture of the mouse in our animal book makes him wrinkle up his face and say No No No and wiggle his fingers with disgust). As expected, large roaring dinosaurs were no big deal, despite Daddy trying his best to make them seem scary (mean ol' Daddy). He was fine with most all of them with the exception of the T. Rex at the end (smart boy). Natalie put on a brave face and proclaimed loudly that she was not scared this time, but I think she protested a bit too much.

It was a beautiful day, and a fun family outing. We are having more days like that now - yeah! Unfortunately the nice weather must have brought a nasty virus along with it, and one by one we've been battling it.

These Boots Are Made For Walkin

Someone feels pretty cool in his Christmas boots...

Huhm

And this is what it sounds like when Owen tries to say Liam. It is a name that seems hard for kids to pronounce, for some reason. When Liam was in preschool, it was always cute to hear how other kids said his name. Usually it was Leem or Lim or Lamb. I've never really heard Owen's way of pronouncing it. Sometimes he makes it very guttural too, like it's a Yiddish word or something. Other times it is just Huhm. Very cute.

Nah-lee!!!!

Now that Owen and Natalie are "friends" I get to hear Owen shouting her name...about 2,000 times a day. From the minute he wakes up until bedtime when he searches her out for a bedtime kiss from Nahhhleeee. It is very cute. Although...kind of like hearing Mommmyyyy 2,000 times a day, too much of a good thing can always be a little tiring. He must know where she is at every moment, or else he gets that worried look.

My heart felt a little twinge yesterday, when it hit me that I don't even know exactly when Owen stopped calling Jim "papa" and started calling me Mommy. The papa, with the accent on the second syllable was so cute. It obviously just meant "man" to him though, and so when Jim really became Daddy, he stopped being just a papa. And Mama - well, he never said that a whole lot at all, until I really became Mommy, and now I hear it in tandem with Natalie. If each of them says it 2,000 times a day, that must mean I hear it about 4,000 times a day. But when I heard a boy say Papa yesterday, it made me panic just a bit that I'm letting all of these changes slide by without taking notice. I need to take more video before these moments are gone.

In the meantime, a little video snippet of Owen's "Nahhh-leeee". I took it on the camera, so the video is not great, but so much easier than trying to convert the very nice video from the fancy schmancy HD video recorder that takes me 3 hours to convert one tiny snippet into something that can be posted. Very frustrated with that right now.

Friends!

My head is spinning! In fact, it may have just exploded. I actually heard Natalie utter these words yesterday: "Owen is my best friend, Mommy." Never mind the fact that she was growling at him (literally) not too many minutes later. Growling is actually kind of effective with Owen, it appears. He picks up a toy she doesn't want him to touch...she goes "grrrrr" and gives him the stink-eye...and he drops the toy and moves on. So maybe they have figured out a way to coexist now. Or maybe the Circle of Death helped them have some fun together and desensitized Natalie. Or maybe now that six months has passed (could it really be true?!) they are settling in. Or maybe the moon was aligned with the stars and the sun for just a couple of days and it will all fall apart soon. In any case, the last few days these two have been truly playing together. Really playing together. Yes, this basically means that Natalie is telling Owen what to do and he does it. But I think that is the way it is supposed to work at this age. It works something like this:

N: Owen, put these animals in this cart and follow me. (He nods, and follows.)

N: Owen, which princess outfit do you want? How about Cinderella? Here, let me help you put this on. Do you want shoes? (Owen nods vigorously, and they go on a hunt for shoes together).

I'm lovin' it!

Like Daddy

Owen has a new sweater that is just like one that Daddy has. He put on the watch Liam got for Christmas, and really thought he was something. He kept patting his chest and saying "daddy". He looked so serious checking his watch like he was late for a meeting.

I'm keeping this post short because I'm sneaking onto Jim's computer to write it. My laptop is with the Best Buy Geek Squad for a terrible illness. And, according to the Geek Squad, Facebook is the root of all evil. Hmmm...or is it that Geeks don't have any friends so they are just jealous?? Just sayin'... Actually, the whole time I was talking to Mr Geek Squad (and yes, he was rather geeky) I was thinking how silly he must feel every time he answers the phone "Geek Squad, can I help you?" Then again, that geek had a lot of business - he must have answered the phone 10 times while he was in the middle of helping me.

Anyway, I'd better hope I don't infect Jim too, or I'll be in trouble. Shhh...don't tell.

Overheard

Putting Natalie to bed one night, I snuggled next to her and joked, "Natalie, tell me all your secrets!"

She told me very seriously, "Mom. I can't tell you my secrets. Secrets are not to tell, they are to NOT tell."

Me: "Well, tell me your dreams then."

Natalie: "Nope. It's the same thing as a secret."

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Owen while rocking before bed:

"Cockey (which is how he says hockey) blah blah blah (words I couldn't understand) Daddy blah blah BLAH BLAH GOAL!!!"

I think he was recounting a hockey game on the driveway with Daddy. He is crazy about hockey right now. He wants to sleep in his hockey gloves, which poses a problem as they are not the most conducive to easy rest...imagine brushing a stray hair out of your face while wearing hockey gloves. OK...his hair doesn't really get in his eyes, but you know what I mean.
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And Liam's new pastime is reading street signs, and then hollering out directions when you least expect it. For instance, we'll be driving along quietly, minding our own business when all of the sudden he'll shout, "Share the road with bicycles, Dad!!!" Or my favorite, when it was still fairly warm out, "Watch for ice on the bridge!!!" I guess it's always good to have another set of eyes keeping us on track, as long as he doesn't cause an accident by scaring the daylights out of us with his sudden outbursts.

Circle of Death

That is Jim's nickname for the Jumpolene. Although I think in order to call it that, you are supposed to turn the lights off and egg on the kids as they bounce off one another like ping pong balls in a lottery machine. I particularly like the way their hair all stands straight up from the static while bouncing (not that it looks that much different than normal, in Owen's case). Good news is that I think it may be desensitizing Natalie to a certain degree, all this crashing into and falling over each other. Bad news is that jumping off the sides of the ring like a pro wrestler comes far too naturally to Owen, and I'm already having nightmares about his future career as the Siberian Slammer.

2009 - What a Year It Was!

2009 - where have you gone?
It was a good year. It was an emotional, nerve-wracking, exhausting, thrilling, momentous kind of year. A year that started off with so much waiting that was so excruciating it made minutes seem like hours, but ended with so much craziness that weeks flew by like minutes.

For certain, it was a year I will never forget. We welcomed a new family member, and spent almost a month in Russia. We had so much support, and the kids had so much bonding time, with Grandma and Grandpa. We got to celebrate a 50th anniversary and spend time with family that was long overdue.

And in the midst of all that, so many smaller milestones were reached. Tying shoes, riding a bike without training wheels, giving up a pacifier, learning to swing, learning to read... Some with not as much fanfare as they deserved because, well, the weeks flew by like minutes.

Our family was shaken upside down, and then put back down in different places in 2009. It took some time to get used to the new positions, but by the end of the year it started to feel familiar and a lot more solid.

We were so very blessed this year with Owen, with Liam and Natalie, with all of our extended family and friends. I can't imagine a year to top 209. Which is a good thing, because I have not spent a single minute thinking about 2010 yet. I don't have goals, I don't even have an idea of where I want this year to head. I don't even have January in my calendar yet. My mind is empty and my heart is full. I guess that is a good way to start a year. I'll just take it a day at a time.

Happy New Year to everyone!

Happy New Year!