Week of June 5, 2002

Interaction, not observation, rules the day. Owen is still a sponge, but now he is using the information he gathers. How do I get to things? What do I do with this? How do I engage that person? How do I make the world do what I want? This new stage is like watching a fern unfurl after being delighted with the fiddlehead.

He continues to explore and reach and crawl and stand, but he plays more actively and intelligently. He's getting more adept at his nesting cups, stacking his rings, and getting the pieces of his Sparkling Symphony into the correct holes. He experiments too, noting what other round things will fit into the holes -- and what will set off the music and what won't. Cars are to be chewed on, but they also roll. He delights in putting thing onto surfaces and taking them off, putting things inside other things and taking them out. Turning things off and on. When he gets things right, he beams with each "good job!" we offer up. The smile is amazing, we feel guilt that our words can light him up so completely. He hands us things to hear us say "thank you!" and smiles each time we say it.

Food blather.
He's realized he can get rid of undesired food by feeding Scott and I. We were so entertained by his feeding us that we accidently reinforced the behavior by smiling. It's taken a while to extinguish the behavior (or rather, he's substituted dropping the unwanted bits on the floor). When he's hungry, he'll try lots of different things for us. Unfortunately, he's been going through bouts of teething lately, so we haven't had as much luck this week. Normally he'll eat most of the things we'll eat, with special fondness for green beans, bananas, strawberries, french toast, eggs, ham, veggies picked out of stews, etc. Although we worried he'd get stuck on white foods, he became quite amenable to new things. This weeks' adventure, the Bean Sprout Squares at Laura's Grosser's 5th birthday party, were a big hit. He's also tried blueberries, and a burrito. He's much less interested in nursing or even drinking from a bottle these days, sigh. He'd rather eat what we're eating.

Book blather.
Owen's taken to our nightly reading, finally. In our efforts to get him sleepy, each night since he was tiny we'd have a bath and then break out the books. Often he'd be focused solely on drinking his milk, or perhaps he was listening to our voices, but it seemed his attention was anywhere but on the book. I suspect we could have been reading the Wall Street Journal in silly voices and gotten just as much action from it. In the last few weeks, however, he's started looking at the pictures. And trying to turn the pages. He clearly prefers some books over others, and will get upset if we try to sway him to something we'd prefer to read. He also wants us to read his favorites over and over again. Moreover, he wants to look at his books at times other than after his bath. He's crawling over to his bookcase not to pull the books off, but to find his favorites and look through them. We're thrilled! Although it's gotten to be difficult feeding him, he's much too excited by the books to waste time drinking.

His current favorites: Dear Zoo, Neighborhood Animals (by Baby Einstein) and The Big Red Barn. Dear Zoo is a sturdy flap book, and with each animal, he excitedly lift the flap in the appropriate direction and then carefully recloses it again. Neighborhood Animals has wonderful close up photos, and he loves to look at the picture of the cat, and very clearly goes "Tat!" Often he'll stroke the face or try to kiss the picture. The Big Red Barn is a wonderful story filled with animals as well, and his favorite page is the one with the family of cats and the family of dogs. He'll impatiently flip through the rest of the books to get to those favorite pages.

 

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