This week was rather a blur and I realized I didn’t really snap too many photos this week of Finn or the construction! Kevin, however, was in the backyard dribbling the soccer ball with Finn and got a cute video.

On Tuesday, Finn had his 15 month checkup and he is doing outstanding! He weighed in at 22 pounds, 9 ounces (47th percentile), 31″ tall (43rd percentile), and head circumference of 47.4 cm (67th percentile).  His motor skill development is great. He is able to walk, almost run, climb, pick up the tiniest speck of something with his pincer grasp. He says so many words, including Mama, Dada, dog dog, night night, more, nu nu (for naked baby!), book, dirty, no, walk, bite, paci (more like boppy), thank you, please, yes, and he makes the sounds of many animals when he sees them in books. Albeit not all of the words are enunciated perfectly, but he definitely says the same thing over and over, for instance when he wants to read a book (buh). And he continues to be a good sleeper, sleeping 10-11 hours at night and taking two naps (around 2 1/2 hours each) a day.

The garden is finally taking off a bit more. This week seeds of cantaloupe germinated and several of the other plants are getting much larger. I planted some free plants from work, including red romaine lettuce and curly endive as well as green beans. We’ve harvested the smallest handful of ripe baby strawberries, which Finn instantly devoured. Seems as though the blossoms on the butternut squash are aborting. It’s so weird, at first I was blaming bunnnies, but after looking closer at a couple of flowers that looked wilted they just fall right off.  Hmm, not sure what to make of that. In any case, looking forward to using some fresh veggies once our kitchen is complete! Finn had another fun week with Debbie heading out to many adventures including the zoo and the splash park. It was a less noisy week of construction, but the house remains largely off limits on the first floor for little boys who pick up everything they see!  Saturday evening we had a nice date night and kept things local by heading to downtown Powell to “Celebrate Powell”. It included many shops staying open late to celebrate the re-opening of Powell Rd at 315. We stumbled upon a new shop, Elm and Iron, which had a lovely antique truck serving beer and wine (from the Powell Village Winery) and cookies from Sweet Tooth Cottage (in Powell, where we got Finn’s birthday cookies). It is a home-decor shop that had an Open House. There was also a photographer there doing Tintype photographs, so we thought it would be fun to have ours taken. I learned that Kevin has always loved that type of photograph so he was very excited! You’ll see a photo of our photo below (sorry about the shadows). 

On Sunday we celebrated Dad’s birthday and Father’s day with a trip to Mansfield. You can see, the hosta’s are larger than Finn in some cases! Dad is changing over some hosta beds in their garden, so we are excited to be planting some of his named varieties as well as some other large clumps of hostas at the southern branch of HostaWorks in Powell.  On the remodeling front, this week was mostly drywall finishing – taping and mudding. Jim and Kevin installed a few more can lights in the kitchen ceiling, and the refrigerator now has the water line connected again for ice and water, which is great!  Most of the tile has been removed and only some small areas of the under-layment remains in the laundry room and close to the front staircase. After the tile had been removed from the eating area of the kitchen, Kevin discovered that the floor seemed a bit bowed. Brett came up again mid-week and after investigating they determined the floor was uneven because a joist was too high (bowed up). You can see in the pics below the blue string line which Brett cut down with a saw. Then we replaced the old plywood with new in that area. 

Finn still loves to cuddle in the morning and continues to be mesmerized by Sesame Street. We are weaning him off the bottle, but it’s really kind of cute, in the mornings when you go in after he is awake he says “ba ba” and if you ask him to (and sometimes without even prompting him) he will put his pacifier on the ledge of his crib. He isn’t really completely hooked on his pacifier other than when he sleeps, so we’ve been having him leave it in his room when he wakes up and then he gets it again at nap time. It’s working really well and he doesn’t even fuss when he puts it down!  Have a good week!