Birthday!

Oliver turned two on October 28th (does that make this his second birthday or his third?) Here is a family gathering we had the weekend before. Last year he was just sort of confused. This time he was extremely enthusiastic. He was surrounded by people he knows, he was the center of attention, and he got to unwrap one present after another. Add some cupcakes to that, and it was a good day for him.

Pumpkin Patch with the Petersons

On Saturday we went to a great pumpkin farm we hadn't tried before, where we were joined by our friends Danny and Sylvia Peterson and their wonderful kids Julia and William. There were a million other people there, but the farm was spread out and we had plenty of room for animal petting, hay rides and all that. It was a blast.

Julia looked after Oliver a little bit -- especially when he took off running from the group to see the baby chicks again. She chased after him and herded him back. She also took him on a little ferris wheel for kids only.

Here William and Oliver help push the cart with our pumpkins to the weighing station. Strong guys!

Last Days of One

Oliver turns two on the 28th. We've been working for a while on his answer to the question "How old are you?"

"One!"

So now we'll have to do some new training. In the meantime, he's speaking in full, if challenging, sentences. We're having so much fun with him!

I took this picture a couple days ago when I picked Oliver up from daycare. He seems to be the only kid in the room, but there were several others. Here's the gang that gathered around me when I came into the room.

Oliver is about to transition from the "Wobbler" room to the toddler room, where he'll hang out with 2 and 3 year olds. He spends a couple hours in that room each day. The great thing is that, as Jenny and I are working on the potty training at home (not much progress yet other than some useful vocabulary), the daycare will reinforce the lessons. They have a bathroom right next to the toddler room for just that. Won't that be great!

Oliver is really into his blocks and we have a great time building houses and choo-choos with them. Sometimes, he'll just spend a long time, quiet and absorbed, sorting them by color and shape, or building little structures like this:

A blurry shot from our walk this afternoon (with Abbie in tow).

Sunny Weekend at the Beach

Last weekend we loaded up the boy and the dog, some Bob the Builder videos and buckets and boots and tennis balls, and went to our favorite beach getaway -- Proposal Rock in Neskowin. We've gone there at least once or twice a year for a long time now. We like the dog-friendly rentals right off a beautiful beach and a creek perfect for dog splashing. The weather was amazing, sunny and warm. We were so ready for rain! In fact, we wished we'd packed shorts, sunscreen, and flip-flops.

We last took Oliver here when he was just six months old. I remember he just sat there in the sand, tasted some of it, and smiled at the wind. This time, he was much busier. He found a bucket of toys in the condo and brought as many as he could hold out to the sand, where he had a lot of fun just shoveling sand and flinging it as far as he could (a lot of it into his own hair, and a bit into mine). There was also shell collecting, wading in the creek, running after seagulls, and throwing the ball for Abbie (who is always disappointed to have to chase a ball less than ten feet.)

-Keith

The Last Days of Summer

We’re a bit behind on our updates. The kitchen remodel has taken up a lot of time, led to a lot of take-out meals, and generally thrown the whole household out of balance.
The good news is that our countertops will be installed this week, and after that I can hook up the sink, dishwasher, and oven. We still have to figure out the tile plan for our backsplash, but we can actually start to use the kitchen soon. In fact, the new fridge and microwave are in, so things are slowly coming into order.

In the meantime, I’m going to throw in random Oliver updates from the past few weeks. In general, he’s stringing words together into full sentences and expanding the songs he likes to sing beyond the ABC and Elmo songs and also doing “Old McDonald” and a version of “Camptown Races” (“doo-da, doo-da!”).

The often seen (but seldom blogged) unhappy face. It gets much worse than this :-)

As for his sentences, they take some practice to comprehend and rely heavily on context and understanding of his mispronunciation. Its all classic toddler stuff: milk is “milch” and guitar is “tar.” The funniest thing is just how he yells at us all the time to get our attention and show us something: “MOMMY! DADDY! MOMMYDADDY!” (he says that even when there’s just one of us.)

Oliver’s current obsessions include choo-choos, Bob the Builder, and Ernie on Sesame Street.

Today he had a breakthrough; he announced to us that he was going to put on his boots, and then he actually got them out and put them on correctly all by himself! That was his first successful self-dressing of any kind, so during a break in the rain, we went out to splash in puddles and throw a golf ball up the sidewalk.


This is from a couple weeks ago, when Jenny took him to the zoo to try to see the new baby elephant. That little guy is huge celebrity! I think they put it off for a time when it was less crowded (see that line behind Oliver?)

Kruger's Farm

Today we went to Kruger’s Farm, just outside Portland on Sauvie Island.

Here is a video of Oliver almost getting his hand bitten off by a ferocious swine. Close call!




This is a long Labor day weekend, and we’ve been surprised by some rainy weather. We left the farm shortly after these photos, when the rain started to pour.

Around the house, we’ve been focusing on painting the kitchen. The flooring should go in this week and hopefully, the piece to fix our cabinets will come in, so that we can get our countertops ordered.

A Little Kid Comedy Classic

Trying on everyone's shoes!

Hot August Days, Singing and Counting

A couple days ago we received a surprise visit from our old friends Dan and Victoria and their beautiful children, Esther and Elliot. Dan and Victoria used to live next door. It’s funny, but it doesn’t seem that long ago that they bought a house in the next neighborhood and moved away, but in that time, we’ve all started families and suddenly we have three kids on the sidewalk saying Hi to one another when it used to be just be our dogs!

We’ll post more on the kitchen when it’s finished, but we’ve met with a snag; our cabinet designer and installer messed up a key measurement, and the result is that the passageway to the side door and the basement is much too narrow. Fortunately, they’re working to make things right and we should soon have an adjustment to fix the situation. All the other cabinets look great. We’re ready to do some painting, and we’ve selected our flooring. But the cabinet fix, floors, and countertops will take some time, so it looks like we’ll be using our makeshift kitchen for a bit longer. We eat out a lot.

Oliver is talking and singing all the time. Here is a clip of a song he repeats over and over again. It’s to the tune of the ABC song, and it usually starts off with “Now I know my…” before it goes off into his own language:



He’s also really into trains. Every time we hear the train whistle a mile away, he gets excited about the “choo-choo.” Yesterday we decided to take him on the train at the zoo, which we did earlier this summer, but that was before he knew the words “choo-choo.” Now that he knows what he’s talking about, he's much more enthusiastic.
So we took the train from the zoo to the Rose Garden and had a nice picnic there, as we’ve tried to do each year around our anniversary. There is a little amphitheater with a grassy area below and a wooden stage where you can various performances. Yesterday it was empty and kids where playing on it. Here is Oliver running on the stage (and tripping) while demonstrating his ability to count to 10:



And a couple pictures of the pool in the backyard. We had a couple 100+ degree days recently!

Eating Outside

Here is Oliver, snacking on a fresh cucumber (he was just supposed to take it inside). The cucumbers have done OK in our small potted garden out front. The squash, which usually become fruit producing monsters by this point, haven't done as well. I think next year we'll give them more room to breath.

I think a better title for this post would be "Eating out" because we're doing a lot of that these days. We're in the middle or remodeling our kitchen. All the old cabinets are out (see them out in the front yard behind Oliver? Classy, huh?) and as soon as I'm done with this post, I'm going remove the old plumbing lines and put in some new copper pipe. Right now, the delivery time frame for our new cabinets is unclear, but we're assuming the install could start next week, so I need to keep busy!

Going without a kitchen is tough. Here is our temporary cooking area, formerly the dining room, with a tiny dorm fridge and butane cooking stove. I'm tempted to unwrap our new fridge in the corner, just to have more room for food, but for now it will have to wait.

Here is where I mounted our old cast-iron sink over the bathtub for a dishwashing station. Yes, we do a lot of walking between the dining room and the bathroom.

Getting the kitchen finished will take some time, so I'll post the "after" pictures when all is done. I also need to post the "after" pictures of the garage project, but it will be winter before I've completed the interior.
-Keith