Kinder Tales

Owen has been growing and learning and saying really funny things, but since so much of my time is spent updating Isla’s monthly blog posts I am afraid I have neglected writing about him for quite some time. The above photo is from all the way back in March, those pants don’t even fit him anymore!

We just visited the doctor and Owen weighs 45 pounds these days. He is just under the 50th percentile for weight and just over it for height, so he is tall and skinny. Well, tall for our family anyway.

Here is Owen in May trying out his new bike he got for his birthday from Grammie and Grampy. Back then he was still a kindergartner who was almost done with the year and looking forward to the summer. Some cute things he said around that time:

When we were looking at houses we stumbled upon one a bit out of our price range one day, and when Owen saw that wonderful finished basement he said, “we could play the dice game down here!” Which, if translated, I think meant, “this is just as nice of a basement as Unlce Rob and Aunt Joanne have, which is where we play the dice game on Christmas day”.

Owen learned about the presidents in kindergarten when they prepared for a school presentation. Owen came home very excited and told us how he learned there was a bowling alley and a swimming pool inside the White House. He said, “so Daddy should be president so we can live in the White House!” Daddy jumped in and said, “Oh no, I don’t want to be president, I can’t stand politics”. Then without missing a beat, Owen turned to me and said, “how about you Mama?” I loved that he didn’t think twice about a woman being president.

On one of the last days of school the Oprah show was ending. I told him we couldn’t play in the playground after school because I wanted to get home and watch the last couple Oprah shows. When we turned it on and it was a big party he got excited and said “I wanted to go there, too bad I had school. Maybe we should have canceled school so we could go.” Yep, because that’s all that was standing in our way Whenever Owen was sick he would say, “we need to cancel school” as if it was an appointment we had made.

Owen with the cast of one of his favorite shows. He calls them “the Simptons”. He also still says, “pacept” for except.

Owen at “Park 2″ as he calls it. We also had Park 1, and Park 0 within walking distance of our apartment. I forget where Park 3 is, but we now live next to the newly christened Park 4. Owen is getting a little braver at the park these days as you can see from the photo.

Owen and Daddy on Daddy’s birthday. That’s a pound cake, which is one of the only sweets these two guys can handle. Owen really started to embrace celebrating holidays lately. He has also really begun some intensive questioning about religions, gods, and cultural belief systems. It is hard for him to understand the concept that other people believe in something different than his family, when we all have the same information and reasoning abilities in front of us. He continues to ask us about all of the different gods and all of the different religions and tries to understand why people believe in what they do.

Soon kindergarten was over and it was summer vacation! Here is Owen planting his plants on the balcony this summer. He planted all of the plants this year. Some of them grew and some didn’t. He planted all the seeds in pots, and then lined the pots on the railing of the balcony, and then watered them periodically throughout the summer. It was a good outdoor activity for him.

Here is Owen in his favorite place at our apartment: outside on the balcony in his sandbox. On this day he decided to fill his socks with sand. It’s amazing how much he got in there!

Since we have moved he has spent every single day outside playing in the dirt in our backyard. He just sits out there on his own very content, or he plays with the neighbor kid in his yard or in our yard. Even though we didn’t get to go camping this summer, he seemed to fill his outdoor quota with these other activities.

After having a TV-free summer in 2010, the summer of 2011 was filled with too much screen time! Owen has about 3 plug and play retro and Star Wars video games that he played, as well as watching a good deal of PBS kids. I didn’t have the energy to ban screen time as I was busy trying to find a house, packing, and taking care of a toddler. I really think that the excessive TV viewing was a byproduct of apartment living though because he has barely watched anything since moving to our new house. He prefers to play in the back yard, which I’m very happy about.

Ever since he has been really little, Owen has loved these guys that dress up at the Mall. He runs up and hugs them and waves to them. This is very odd because he is an anxious and very slow to be social kid, yet he interacts with these guys like he’s a bold outgoing kid. Recently he has started to question me about these guys. He said, “why are there funny animals that know they are alive?” I told him they are just people dressed as animals, and he promptly stopped paying attention to me. I guess he prefers to keep the magic alive a little longer

Owen in the middle of summer enjoying a smoothy, one of his favorite treats.

Throwing rocks in the lake we often walk around during the summer months. We only got there once or twice this busy summer, but Owen remembered all his favorite spots to play around.

Before we moved I took some final photos of Owen’s room. He had this nice big room from the time he was 2 and a half to the time he was six. I had painted it for him before we even moved in. At first we decorated it with cowboy decorations from his nursery in the house we had before the apartment. Then his preference shifted to robots and outer space, so his room became a funny mixture of cowboys, robots and outer space as well as some odds and ends from thrift stores that didn’t match anything else. His new room is just robots and outer space, and we have saved all the over random decorations for the play area. Owen still misses his old room and our old apartment, but hopefully he will get used to our new house soon. It should help that his room is now finished being painted and his toys are in there  so he can play in it.

Here is Owen is his old room one more time right before we left the apartment for the last time. It looks a lot smaller without all of his stuff!

When we were looking for a house one day we were discussing houses and how much we thought we could afford. Owen heard our conversation and said that if we didn’t have enough for a nice house we could have some of his money from his piggy bank. What a sweet boy.

Speaking of money, lately Owen had been saving up to go to Sea Life Aquarium. He also started a money unit for math at school. He began counting his money over and over and over again. He told us that ever since he started saving up and learning about money in school he has really started to like money. He tells us he wants to make a lot of money when he grows up and be rich. I guess we have a little Alex P. Keaton on our hands!

Owen’s kindergarten teacher gave each kid a calendar of the summer and a sheet of stickers with activities on them. The idea was to do as many activities as possible. They were things like, “buy an ice cream cone on a hot day” or “go on a picnic”. This is Owen posing at the end of the summer with his filled up calendars. He managed to do each activity.

And then it was time to start first grade. We went to his school one day to meet his teacher and see his classroom. Here is Isla showing us Owen’s locker.

A banner by the first grade rooms welcomes us!

And here we are dropping off school supplies and checking out Owen’s room. Owen got to choose his desk, so he chose one right by the teacher and right by one of his best friends.

This is Owen on his first day of school. His teacher is bran new to the school, and seems nice enough. Owen is doing well this year, though he got thrown off a bit when the school had a real lock down due to a burglary in the neighborhood. But I think he is back on track and doing well. He is a bit bored in math, but recently some of the moms have started to volunteer with the kids who are working ahead so that has helped a bit. Owen has made a new friend this year and has even gone on a couple play dates with him.

Owen continues to be constantly curious and inquisitive. He likes to ask about strings being the smallest thing in the universe (string theory) and he likes to speculate about whether there is a multiverse or not (he believes there is one). He has given up on being a magician ever since my sister showed him a scary illusionist show, and he is now trying to decide if he wants to be a paleontologist, archeologist, nuclear physicist (or in his words, “the person that discovers new elements”), or a stay-at-home dad.

One day shortly after Isla was born he announced that he had decided to become a dad when he grows up. Months later I asked him what he was going to be when he grew up and he said, “that’s a hard choice. I’m trying to decide if I should be a paleontologist, an archeologist, or a dad”. I suggested that he could be a dad and one of those other things. He said, “but then I’ll have to work all the time and I won’t have any time for my kids”. I said, “oh, are you thinking about being a dad that stays home with your kids, and then your wife will work?” and he said, “yeah, cause I want to play with them and stuff, and if I have to go to college and then have a job all day I’ll never get to see my kids”. I thought it was touching that he holds the stay-at-home parent’s job in such high esteem that he would find it just as fulfilling as those other jobs. However, I am rooting for a science occupation for him. Maybe he can take a few years off to raise the kiddos I think having Isla has really made him want to be a dad someday himself and he often mentions it. He says he needs to learn household things to “learn how to be a dad”. Whatever he decides we will be happy as long as he is happy. I do think though that having the goal of dad in mind might help him to learn to do things around the house that he might not otherwise be interested in mastering, so I’m glad this is a goal at the moment even though I expect it will change as he grows.

In a surprising turn of events, Owen started to take a real liking to football last season. He sits and watches the games and gets very involved with them at times. This is surprising since neither of his parents are that into football, or any other sport. Owen seems to really like the competition and identifying with a home team as well as the math involved in scoring, the trivia involved in learning about different teams, and the rules involved in the game. He likes other sports as well, like baseball and basketball, but football is his favorite. I am not crazy about the violence, or the objectification of women in football, but I do think it might be of value for him socially to relate to other guys when he is older so I have allowed it – albeit with lots of discussion around the issues I personally object to. This season he has not started watching yet because if it is warm enough for him to play outside happily, then I would rather he do that. He did watch the end of the Packers versus Vikings game though, and was once again disappointed by our lame team.

I am sure I am forgetting things, but those are the main things Owen is up to lately. We are very proud of him, and very tired after a long day of being asked a googalplex questions