Green Hour Roundup, 2/10-2/16/08

Green Hour Roundup, 2/10-2/16/08.

I mentioned Green Hour in my last post, and maybe you've seen the attractive little button over there to your right in the side bar. In a nutshell, this generation of children is the first in history that's at risk of a so-called "nature deficit disorder," and hopefully regardless of where you fall on the political, environmental, social and parenting spectrums, you can get behind that. To take it to a total extreme, some children's experience of the "outdoors" involves only parking lots.

Richard Louv wrote a quite well-received book, "Last Child in the Woods" about this nature-deficit disorder, if you want more information.

Anyway, I'm going to try to make a habit of briefly journaling our activities for Green Hour, even if it's just Green Few Minutes. It seems like it's going to be really easy to make experiencing nature part of our daily routine (even after 1 week I'm ultra-conscious of it), so the hard part for me is probably going to be blogging about it. So don't think I've failed if I'm not writing about it!

Week 1: February 10th- 16th, 2008

Sunday 2/10
We put Ollie in the carrier and hiked around the Florida Canyon Nature Preserve, which is less than a mile from our house. It's part of Balboa Park/Morely Field. This was so wonderful and lovely, and Ollie loved it. We did too. It was nice to get outside. However (and I keep trying to remind myself that everyone needs their green hours), Erik totally saw someone getting a BJ down a canyon. Note to self: stay closer to the roads from now on.

Monday 2/11
Nelwyn, a fellow green hour crusader, and I took the boys to the beach. We did a decent walk along the Coronado beach and then let the boys have at the sand and the waves. This was a lot longer than an hour! They loved it. The new textures of the sand and water, the new smells and sounds, the abundance of seagulls and other birds, delicious sea minerals (for lucca) and the amazing weather.

Tuesday 2/12
I was watching my friend's kid (just a few months older than Ollie) that day, so we naturally spent a lot of time walking around trying to manage naps. Then we met Nelwyn and Lucca at the Morley Field playground where the boys played in the grass and the woodchip playground. I have a picture on my camera of Lucca pushing Ollie in his little walker wagon on the grass. Oh, the cuteness.

Wednesday 2/13
A direct quote from an email to Nelwyn that night: "today we did a green "hour" (10 minutes) in our front yard and with the potted bamboo behind krakatoa. it was freaking cold out."

Our front yard is all (newly) native plants, and many of them are flowering right now. It's beautiful! (In a native coastal desert sort of way) They're also starting to attract some wildlife (mostly bees and caterpillars at this point - some birds). I can't wait to watch the garden come along! But yes, it was freaking cold out. Like, 60! We also let him touch the potted bamboo behind Krakatoa coffee house in Golden Hill. Meh, it counts as nature.

Thursday 2/14
It rained today, so we spent some time on the porch watching and pointing at birds. Maybe 5 minutes total.

Friday 2/15
Nelwyn and I took the boys to Ocean Beach to a little park by People's Co-op. We bought some lunch at the co-op deli and fed the boys steamed broccoli and let them crawl around and play in the playground.

Saturday 2/16
Erik and I took Ollie for a hike in Mission Trails Regional Park, the largest urban park in the country! I have an unhealthy love for Mission Trails. I spent a lot of time discovering the whole expanse of the park during my work as a coach and as staff for Hike For Discovery at LLS, and also, Erik proposed there! Anyway, it is absolutely STUNNING there right now. Go now! It's super green and smells delicious. We hiked from the visitor center down to the river at the bottom of the valley and bac up. Ollie loved pointing at things.

That is all.

New Tricks.

New Tricks.

Ollie now has two front top teeth, in addition to the ones on the bottom. Actually, the top teeth are just teeny slivers of teeth so far. One broke through on Tuesday (his 10 month birthday), and the other yesterday (Wednesday). Teeth!

He loves being hand-fed. Hates the spoon, but will take anything that I manually put in his mouth with my fingers. He will pick up pieces of food, play with them, drop them, feed them to me (and as of this morning, to Lucca too) (yes, it was totally adorable), but he will not put the pieces of food in his own mouth. He has no interest in it. Usually he just holds it up for me to take from him, and waits with his mouth expectantly open for me to place in his mouth.

Did I mention that HE FED LUCCA? The cuteness of those two boys knows no bounds.

Even though he hates avocado, he loves garbanzo beans. Garbanzo beans are slightly redeeming. Lets see if they make him as gassy as they make his mama.

The pointing is now less of a circle and more of a Papal Blessing hand motion, as described by my dad today. Pope Oliver the First sort of gestures a little with a partially pointed hand. Bless you my child. Actually, it's more like: Bless you my light. Bless you my bird. Bless you my baby monitor green light. Bless you my ceiling fan. Bless you my light again.

He signed "more" very clearly tonight at Greg and Shawna's, and I almost didn't even notice. I was looking right at his hands, and just assumed he was trying to get two pieces of food situated in each hand. Sure enough, he wanted *different* food in his mouth.

We've been keeping "green hour" every day this week, starting on Sunday. Maybe we'll do it for his entire life. I don't know. It was raining today, so it was more like "green 5 minutes," but we more than made up for it earlier in the week.

He loves the waves:

Overexposed

Overexposed

Overexposed but still cute. Oliver at 10 months:



















I lost a similar (but, in my mind, way better) photoshoot when the laptop died before I backed up the pictures, so I'm just going to have to whore these out at all opportunities.

It's rude to circle.

It's rude to circle.

Ollie has recently started doing this little pointing thing, which is adorable. It's really stepped up the interaction and I've slipped into this narration mode now that I'm realizing that he is totally tuned in (scary). Totally melts my heart. Except, it's not quite pointing. In fact, it's like the opposite of pointing. He'll take his little index finger and tuck it under his thumb to make a little circle, and then his remaining fingers will sort of flounce upwards. He's kind of making the not-universal-at-all sign for "a-ok!"

I probably don't need to spell it out for you: it's adorable.

Today, after he woke up from sleeping in the car, I got him out of his seat right as a guy walked by on a stroll. Ollie's little circle hand jutted out into the air in the direction of the man, and Ollie grinned with his little post-nap rosy cheeks thing. Oh, the cuteness. We went for a walk shortly thereafter, and he was going a little crazy trying to point (circle) all the birds flying by. I don't think he's really ever noticed birds until today.

And while I'm bragging, I swear I'm not making this up, but today we were playing on our bed, and he pointed (circled) to a space heater I have on a nearby nightstand. I looked at him and said "fan?" mistakenly. I don't know why. We've never used it as a fan, just a heater, and the only word Ollie has probably associated with it is "hot!". Anyway, Mr. Einstein then twists his little body around to point (circle) up at the CEILING FAN. Sure, he could have just been randomly surveying objects of his affection in the room, but I'm partial to the fact that he was all, "No no no, silly mother, that's the heater. THIS is the fan."

9 month photo dump

9 Month Photo Dump.

Ollie is now almost 10 months, so I'm going to commemorate 9 months by posting a bunch of pictures from the last month or so.

Here he is dressed as a pixie for one of his little friend's birthday parties.


It truly takes a village. To keep Ollie's Plumber Crack under wraps, that is. That's Nelwyn doing her duty. Here you can see his little ragamuffin pixie elf wings. I know, elves don't have wings. But Oliver = Elf Army, so we had to allow for his elven nature.


wearing a cape at another friend's birthday party. You should know that after this picture was taken, he was totally, painfully uninterested in the hippie play silks and only wanted to play with the plastic, electronic talking ride-on car. Le sigh. I can only do so much.


on Jack's porch


his new hobbies are: standing on everything, and screaming and screeching at the top of his lungs until he starts coughing. awesome!


I have way more, but Flickr Uploader kept crashing (as usual). I even managed to take some nice portraits of him this week, in the rare split seconds in between lurching towards the camera or crawling off towards electrical outlets. One day! This time I won't delete them from the camera until they're good and backed up.

In other news, Ollie is currently recovering from a bout of The Pukes. It was pretty bad - fever, severe dehydration, etc., and it involved the quintessential middle-of-the-night ER trip wherein I pretty much fended off their crazy interventions with a stick. Formula! Catheter! Anal tylenol! Actually, we let them do the anal tylenol. At least he wouldn't barf it up. Pretty soon he was all better and flirting with the nurses again, who were all, "you wash those diapers YOURSELF?" No, my servant does.

I was kind of alarmed at the lack of a system for getting ER patients a breast pump. Their reasoning for the formula was that they only wanted him to eat a small amount - 2 ounces. I then said, "you know, I can express breast milk!" Enlightened by what seemed like BRAND NEW INFORMATION, they looked into getting a pump and bottles down to us. By the time we left 6 hours later, the pump still hadn't arrived. And the best part was that as they were telling me that my only option was formula, the doctor was all, "don't get me wrong, we love breast feeding!" When we all came to terms with the fact that the pump wasn't coming, they finally just allowed me to nurse him for 2 minutes at a time. Whatever. I highly doubt that I have enacted or inspired any change there. The only thing they probably weened from the event was that Julia is a dirty hippie.

Oh well. All (seems to be) well now.