Mama's Boy

This is a view of Logan that I see quite regularly nowadays.  He pulls himself up on my leg and just hangs on me.  Sometimes he looks up and tries to get me to pick him up, and other times, like this one, he just snuggles up close and hugs my leg.

Lawrence Hall of Science

I take my class on a field trip to the Lawrence Hall of Science every year, and every year they send me a free "teacher preview pass" which I have never used.  I'd been waiting until Owen was old enough to enjoy it.  Well, today was the day.  As per usual, he started out scared of everything-- the noises, the giant bugs (the new XTreme Bugs exhibit), the dinosaur bones...but now that I know to anticipate of these fears, I am learning how to trick Owen into having fun.  Once I got him into a quieter room where he could just play, he was sold on the rest of the museum.

He used a brush to uncover fossils like a "real scientist."
He saw a cast of a Tyrannosaurus skull and a mastodon, and real triceratops bones.
He watched a model of the earth, which changed into other planets and the sun.
He saw all kinds of small animals (geckos, turtles, boa constrictors, snakes, bearded dragons, chinchillas, rabbits, fish, frogs, a tarantula, and more), and he got to pet a rat named Pixie.
He saw three brains: bottle-nosed dolphin, monkey, and human.

He is turning into such a smart little kid.  I was fascinated watching his little mind take in everything and how much he learned and grew in just a few hours.

Owen and a beach ball being blown into the air

Logan playing in a life-sized kaleidoscope

Owen making shapes with his hands, face, back, etc. (germs, germs, germs is all I kept thinking)

Logan played with that big orange foam block for a long time, just pushing it around on the floor and giggling.  That's me taking a selfie in the mirror.  Some rare photographic evidence that I was there, too.

Library

The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day.  And then I'd had enough and I just had to get Owen out of the house before he drove us all mad with his energy.  I took him on an errand and we stopped at the library on the way home.  I don't take Owen to the library that much since I feel like our own personal library, plus my classroom library (from which I often borrow books) is pretty extensive.  But he loved the fact that he got to pick out some books all on his own, and he really got into the whole experience, even finding a comfy chair in which to curl up with his books.

Some of the books he chose: Pout-Pout Fish and the Big-Big Dark (his "sea creature book"), George and Martha: Back in Town, books about bones and muscles, a dinosaur book, and my personal favorite (kind of a wtf? moment): a book about musk oxen.

That's My Baby

Logan will be 10 months old this week.  Ten months old already!  I am trying to savor his baby-ness, knowing that when he grows up, that's it for us; no more babies.  What a sweet and cuddly baby he has been, and I think these two photos really capture what he looks like at this very moment in his life.

Always with the two fingers in his mouth

Serious but sweet

P.S. Logan was totally climbing all over me when I took these.  He had me backed up against the wall in a corner.  I held the camera in my right hand while my left hand intercepted slobbery fingers so they wouldn't smudge my lens, or pull my hair, or scratch my cheek.  He found this to be quite an amusing little game.