Owen is providing plenty of midday entertainment as usual up in his crib via video monitor. Right now he is pulling his hands in and out of his sleeves saying 'in! out!' and then making himself laugh when he waves hello with his hands in the sleeves. That is funny stuff! Next it appears he is moving onto pooh bear lovey kissing dumbo lovey (they have a history of such brazen PDA) and Mr. Big Bear getting put down in the crib corner and told to take a nap.

Little man's vocabulary has skyrocketed lately, and even more noticeably his pronunciation is really starting to improve. He is starting to self-correct words that he has mispronounced for a long time (e.g., ah-no used to be his word for all done, and now if he catches himself saying ah-no, he'll quickly say 'all [pause] Dun!'). He has also corrected his own name, which used to be oh-oh, and now says 'o-WEN!', with passion and frequency! There are still some entrenched words that don't show signs of changing soon...ee-oh for orange and ee-moh for airplane. But I would be sad if there were no more baby words, so I don't challenge him on those ;) Owen almost constantly narrates the world around him when just he and I are together...add more people and he quickly gets quiet, at least until he has warmed up to them.

Ever since nunu (Grandma Spain) sent him a pack of videos about numbers, letters, colors and shapes, Owen has really been learning a lot of preschool info. The world has come alive with letters! Wow, everywhere we go there are letters to identify! This started out (and still is) very cute behavior, but even his proud mommy tires of getting yelled at in her ear while walking into the grocery store, 'Mama! Mama! Tee! Ess! Tee! Mama! Mama!' Owen hasn't really picked up on those social rules of playing it cool in public, and is just as loud and animated as we walk down the aisle...O! M! A! Three! Four! Five! He gets some sideways glances, but mostly lots of grins from grandma-types :)

We went to the indoor playground last week, and showing off has become a major behavior-motivating factor. Owen was very pleased to sit on the bouncy-thingy and show all the other kids that he knew how to make it bounce by himself. He also wanted to play with/near other kids a lot more than he has before...as long as it didn't involve sharing. Sharing is still Not Fun around here. But knocking over blocks together or throwing balls out of the ball pit together is starting to have some appeal. At least maybe he's not a complete antisocial hair-pulling psychopath... :)

Well, this isn't very exciting material, just some notes. Pictures below of Owen's current favorite outside gear (he pretty much dresses himself and announces he wants to go outside) and dipping into the peaches covered in sugar and cinnamon before they went into the pie crust.