Owen- 15 Months

This is a few days late… but better later than never! Owen turned 15 months last Friday and we celebrated by going to the doctor and getting shots!


Owen's 15 Month Stats:
Height: 32.5 inches (91st percentile)
Weight: 26.5 pounds (91st percentile)
Head Circumference: 47.5 cm (70th percentile)


Owen's Favorite (at 15 months)... 
Toys: 
-Play Kitchen, Cart of Food and Ikea Pots and Pans (he likes to walk around throwing items from the cart)
- All of Rex's toys (he likes it when Rex follows him around trying to get his toys back)
- Big Dump Trucks and Hotwheels/Matchbox Cars

Food:
-Cheese
-Grapes
- Milk… still getting 4 bottles a day but we learned at our doctor's appointment that he should be getting less milk from bottles and more from the sippy cup these days. We are working on this.

Development:
- Working on going down the stairs. He likes to try to walk down holding my hands.
- Working on vocabulary. He is behind other children his age in this area so I am trying to read to him more and trying to repeat easy words hoping some of them will stick. Owen should know 5 words at his age and he only knows 2.

House Projects

Just before Christmas, I got a new piece of furniture for the living room- a teal cabinet/console table. I needed something on the wall above it. So I decided to do a gallery wall. It turned out beautifully! I'm glad I did my research before taking on this project. It might look like a bunch of random things thrown up on the wall, but I did actually go through several steps to get it looking like that.

1. I had to decide on a color scheme. I wanted to pull the teal in from the table and also navy because I have navy pillow on my couch. I think gold looks really nice with teal and navy and I thought black frames would be better than white or brown frames. 

2. First I looked through frames I had sitting in storage to see if I could use anything I already had (this was unsuccessful). Then I went to Homegoods and Hobby Lobby. I really hit the jack pot at Hobby Lobby. 

3. Next I measured the area I wanted to cover on the wall and made a template on the floor. That way I could easily play around and get all of my items arranged perfectly. 

4. I used kraft paper and outlined every item complete with an 'x' marking where the hook is to hang the item. Then, I taped all of the kraft paper templates to the wall. Once everything was up on the wall, I tweaked the arrangement to get it just right.

5. Finally, I hammered nails directly into the kraft paper using the 'x's' I marked. Then I hung my items. This step actually took the least amount of time. Here is the finished product…...

I love the way it turned out!

Photos 

My last post had most of my recent photos. I've only taken a few since Christmas… 

Until Next Time,

Tressa

Christmas 2015 Photos

On Christmas Eve we went to the church at 3:00. Owen made it through the whole service! We were very nervous that we would have a meltdown. I came prepared with a bottle and snacks to keep his mouth occupied (and quiet). After church we skipped on over to Great Yia Yia's house for hors d'oeuvres. Then Rich and I took Owen home where my parents were waiting to give him his dinner and put him to bed. Then we met Rich's family at a restaurant for a very nice (kid-free) Italian dinner. I didn't get very many pictures of the evening….

On Christmas morning we opened presents with my side of the family and then Rich's side of the family came over for breakfast. We all went to Rich's parents house for dinner. Here are pictures from the day in no particular order.

Here are some pictures I took a little before Christmas…

Sorry for the very brief post. I am doing this as I feed Owen lunch. I hope everyone enjoys the pictures of Owen's 2nd Christmas. I'm still trying to determine what his favorite gift was…. it might be the toy lawnmower or keys.

Until Next Time…
Tressa

Owen's Hungry Caterpillar Party

Owen's 1st Birthday Party was a success. We held the party at our house and tried to make it as special as we could for Owen (not that he'll remember, but he'll see pictures someday). We hope he and all of his guests had a good time!

This is the balloon wreath I made for the front door. It took 400 balloons to make the wreath. Since I wasn't blowing up the balloons I didn't really care about quality, so I ordered the cheapest balloons I could find on Amazon. I like that I can reuse the wreath by switching out the number hanging in the middle in future years.

I bought this chalkboard a few years ago at HomeGoods and have used it so much (see all of my bump updates and gender reveal party posts). We set the chalkboard up with Owen's stats in the foyer for people to see as they walked in.

Owen has 3 copies of The Hungry Caterpillar! We decided to turn one of them into a birthday keepsake by having his guests write a special birthday message for him. 

The party favors were bags of sour gummy worms (caterpillars). I found a website on Pinterest with free printables for the Hungry Caterpillar theme which I used to make these thank you tags.

Here's the living room pre-party. I got the green tissue decorations from Ikea 50% off. They fold up and are re-usable… so hopefully I find another use for them someday.

I made the caterpillar photo garland out of card stock with my martha stewart circle cutter. I love that I had another use for all the monthly photos I've been taking of Owen. This is still on our fireplace and probably will be until Christmas! I just love seeing how much Owen has changed from month to month.

I also made this Happy Birthday Owen banner out of card stock and my circle cutter. I plan to re-use it at Owen's future birthdays.

I had pictures from our photo shoot with Laurence everywhere. I rolled the plastic ware inside napkins to make it easier to carry (and cuter).

I found this caterpillar neck rest at Homegoods figuring I can use it as a decoration and Owen can have it as a toy/neck rest. So far he isn't interested in it.

We reused the letters from Owen's photo shoot to decorate the drink station. Now that the party is over, I am going to hang them in Owen's playroom. 

I got the labels for the water bottles from the same site as the goody bag labels. Such an easy way to make the party more festive!

A family friend made Owen's cake and smash cake. She did such a good job and it was delicious!

My parents got Owen the "cozy coupe" and it was by far his favorite gift! All he's wanted to do the past few days is be pushed around in it or push it around and use it as a walker. We took it outside to the cul-de-sac today when we went to play with some other kids in the neighborhood. He loved it! I haven't decided if I am going to allow it to come back in the house yet.

Owen's not really interested in opening gifts yet. I hope he'll be there by Christmas.

Owen also wasn't really interested in the cake. He's very clean. He touched it and tried a little, but couldn't really be enticed to dive in. I made his hat, bib and the high chair garland.

I'm disappointed I didn't get any pictures of the food spread and little signs I made to label the food (also from that printables website). I got too busy entertaining ;). I'm so glad so many of our family and friends were able to come celebrate Owen's special day! Now I need to write thank you notes!

Now that Owen is ONE, I won't be doing monthly photos and updates. I will just blog when I have something to blog about. Hopefully it will be at least monthly.

Until Next Time,
Tressa