Boy Oh Boyers

Little lapse in the pictures of the day, but here's a quick one from yesterday. Rowan was seriously resisting changing out of his jammies! Oh, and now you've seen the new funky Mom hair. I so love it!

Anyway, I called this a parting shot because as of this morning Rowan is away on a one week farm adventure at Grandmommy and Papa's house. Everyone down there was just missing him too much, and I couldn't afford to be away from home (that is, my last class) that long, so today we got up and flew to Atlanta where Grandmommy and Aunt Julie whisked Rowan off to the car, and I turned right around and went back through security and caught the flight home. Now here I am, starting work already. Happy Saturday!

Sorry about some glitches on the pictures of the day! They're fixed now, so do go glance for the ones you might have missed. :-)

We've been busy little bees recently. One big milestone to report is that last week, for the first time I recognized, Rowan talked about a memory of an event. We were sitting in the recliner first thing in the morning, Rowan drinking his warm apple cider. Rowan said a long string of words which at first seemed random, but then I started putting it all together. Here's what he said. "Dog. Collar. Green. Purple. Lake. Uncle. Papa. Bye bye dog." This was a story of what we had done the day before: we'd taken a walk to the lake near our house with Uncle Tim and Papa. We had seen two dogs on the path, one wearing a purple collar and one wearing a green collar. After playing with Angel for a few minutes, the two dogs continued on their way and we all said bye-bye to them. Cool, huh?

Another new activity is that Rowan fed himself corn on the cob over the weekend! We went to Jordan Lake to do some canoeing (which was awesome; pictures coming soon) and had a great picnic. Rowan ate this grilled corn like it was goin' out of style!

Let's see: there's asking questions that don't involve repeating anything that was just said. Like, "Mama come?" when Rowan and Daddy were getting in the car this morning to go to the toy store (Mommy was off to the salon.) And, there's counting down until he does something. Like, "1...2...3...throw!" when we're tossing rocks into the creek near our house to make the very rewarding splash. And there was "1...2...slide!" this morning when Rowan was playing on a chair and sliding down to a seated position from standing. The funniest was "1...2...3...JUMP MAMA!" Once I had jumped, he would tell me it's his turn by saying, "Row? 1...2..3...JUMP ROW!"

Last weekend at Jordan Lake, Rowan was in the restroom with me. As usual I was reminding him that it's not nice to unroll the toilet paper because it's wasteful, and he repeats "not nice" while he seriously considers unrolling it anyway. But that time he wasn't interested in unrolling; he was interested in counting! I wasn't shocked to hear him point to the three rolls and say, "One, two, three". I was, however, shocked to hear him point at them again and say, "Uno, dos, tres". He's soaking up Spanish vocabulary from Ms. Erin like a sponge!

For the last bit of news, Rowan and I head to Tennessee next week for a conference at which I'll present, followed immediately by Uncle Dave's wedding to soon-to-be-Aunt Erica. (Convenient these events located very close to each other, huh?) We're transitioning Rowan to Central Time now so Meemaw and I don't spend the first mornings up at 4am with Rowan in our hotel room. At least there would be a Larry King rerun on CNN if it does happen. More interviews with the octuplets' mom? (Yikes!!)