Screamer

Owen turned 7 months on Friday and he is doing new stuff all the time. Last week, he learned how to scream, which he does quite a bit. Here's a taste:



Owen also started "cruising" last week, which is where he walks while holding onto furniture. He walks the length of the couch, along the TV, and has even gone from the chair to the end table. It's so crazy how fast he's learning to do all this stuff!

Last Saturday, Ryan's mom came up and took Owen back to her house until today (Tuesday). It's the longest I have been away from my little punkin, so it was scary, but Ryan and I had a great time. One of our friends came to visit from Colorado, so we spent a couple of days on Lake Delhi and just relaxing and sleeping in! It was very fun, but I missed my little guy. Last night, I had a dream that we got him back and he had started walking and talking! It must have felt like a lot longer than 4 days! When we did get him back though, he came back with TWO teeth! His bottom two teeth have popped up and it's weird to feel them in there. I was nervous to nurse him because I was afraid he'd bite me (you should see the way he gnaws on his bottles!) but he was gentle : ) I think I'm going to start pumping more and start weaning him from breastfeeding, but I'm definitely going to keep him on breastmilk. Formula is EXPENSIVE and (knock on wood), Owen has not been sick yet, so I must be giving him some really good stuff! ; )

I also got another surprise when we got him back because over the weekend he learned to say "Mama"!!!!!! It's so cute. He obviously doesn't know what Mama and Dada mean yet, but I love that those where the first two "words" he said.

And of course since Owen spent some time with one of his grandmas, he got spoiled! He came back with a Pack n Play, a walk toy, a rocking horse and his great-grandma got him some clothes. I think he got a lot of attention too, and got to spend time with some cousins. The walk toy is a little advanced for him right now, but he keeps trying, and he sits on the rocking horse and just smiles. I'm sure it won't be long before he's pushing that walk toy everywhere and rocking that horse like there's no tomorrow. What a little sweetie.

6 Month Pictures

We finally got some milestone pictures taken of Owen. We took him to Portrait Innovations in Waterloo and I think they did an awesome job! We picked four poses to have printed, but they gave us a picture CD with all of his pictures, so here are some of my favorites:

We got prints of this one ^

Prints of this one in sepia (brown) tone ^

Prints of this one ^

Prints of this one  ^

And one 8x10 of these two side by side in a collage-type picture in sepia tone for us.

There were a lot of cute ones to choose from and it's hard not to spend a ton of money! I'm really glad we got the picture CD with it because then we can print some of our own later (which we have already done)!

I was a little disappointed because he was NOT in the smiling mood. All he wanted to do was crawl back toward Ryan or me. There are even some pictures where he just looks terrified! At home he's all smiles, but not there. It's probably a good thing, though, or we would have had even MORE awesome pics to choose from and it would have been even harder to choose without breaking the bank : )

We finally tried some real baby food today! His first veggie was peas and he actually seemed to like them! I made Ryan watch as I fed them to him the first time because I thought he'd have a funny reaction, but he didn't. That's probably a good thing. So we'll stick to peas for the next couple of days and then try something else - carrots maybe. I hate peas AND carrots, but hopefully Owen won't be picky! We'll see, guess! Ace apparently likes baby food peas too because he loved licking some off of Owen's hands. Gross! : )

Dada

Here is a super cute video of Owen talking to his dada:



SO CUTE!

And here is what Owen did today all by himself:

And one-handed, too!

Later, he went to the front door to see what was going on out there.

He's getting really good at standing up, but now he has to figure out how to get down without bonking his head. He's a tough little guy, though!

Good Thing

It's a good thing that I lowered Owen's mattress the other day, because when I went in to get him out after his nap today, this is how I found him:

STANDING UP IN HIS CRIB!

Lowering the mattress in his crib was a pain in the butt, and afterward I decided not to put the bumper pads back in because I was being lazy and I didn't think he really needed them anymore (plus, books that I read before he was born said not to even use them at all). BUT, after he had been in bed for about 20 minutes, I heard him SCREAMING at the top of his lungs, so I went in there and he had gotten his arm stuck through the bars. So I put them back in, but did not tie them to the posts, and when I went in the next morning to get him out, this is what I found:

I'm not sure how he manages to do stuff like this but he did the same thing at my mom's a couple of weekends ago. So I ended up tying them to the posts :)

On Tuesday, Ryan and I took Owen to the pool. The pool in Cedar Falls is really nice and it has a baby pool, lazy river, a family pool, two diving boards and three waterslides. The baby pool has lots of stuff for kids to do and climb on, which of course Owen can't do yet, but it will be fun in the years to come! Anyway, I took Owen in the baby pool first because I thought it would be warmer than the other pool (for gross reasons!) and he acted terrified! He clung to me like a koala bear! It was cute but he was pulling my hair out of my ponytail and I could have stood up and not held on to him and he would have hung on just fine. I was surprised because he LOVES taking baths. So then we took him over to the family pool and it was the same story there. I thought he was going to pull my hair out of my head, so I gave him to Ryan for awhile. Then he was fine! Little turkey! He started smiling and didn't cling to Ryan at all. And later when I took him back (Ryan wanted to go down the slide), he clung to me again like a koala bear. I did manage to unglue him from me a few times and we "swam" around. He seemed to like it, but if I didn't keep him away from my body a little bit, he would cling. I don't know if he just felt safer with Ryan or what, but it was kind of funny. We're going to keep going so he gets more experience.

Owen is always on the move! Today he crawled from the living room all the way to the bedroom, which is the length of our house. Maybe he was looking for his Daddy, who was still in bed. :) He's a master crawler now and getting fast! And yesterday he was babbling away saying "Da-da" quite a bit. He started doing that about 3 weeks ago, but only did it for a couple of days and then stopped until yesterday. I got a few of them out today. I'm working on "Ma-ma" now!

Here are a couple of cute videos I took today.

I didn't even have to clean it up because Ace came right over and ate what was on the floor!

What a cutie! And yes, he fell a little bit and bonked his head at the end. When I put the videos on the computer and watch them, Owen gets a big kick out of seeing and hearing them. He loved that last video!