He reached a few developmental milestones in the last few weeks.
He learned how to smile.
He learned how to pose for a picture. Every parent's dream come true! I think he held this smile for ten whole seconds while I got the camera ready.
This face is nothing new. He's been making it since birth, but I love it so I went ahead and uploaded it. :)
And lastly, he learned that he has hands and that those hands are sooooo tasty! He's still not very coordinated, and actually getting them to his mouth when he wants to chew on them is quite an amusing process. Actually, it's only amusing for us. He gets so frustrated when he wants nothing more than to shove that fist into his mouth and he can't quite seem to make it work. Sometimes his face will turn one direction and his hand will go in the other, and sometimes he whacks himself in the face, which is a big part of the amusement for us. We parents are so mean. ;)
The other babies that we've been seeing are the kind that you might expect to find out at Starkey. They're of the furred and feathered variety. Here are two of the three little (Little? These guys are 20 - 30 pounds at birth!) elk calves that Ryan has found so far. His summer work is going well and we hope that he'll be able to collar many more of these buggers.
I guess at some point we all fall prey to the desire to save a baby animal. Ryan found this little owl on the road and brought him back to the cabin. After making a phone call to ODFW we learned that these little guys--either the young of a great gray or a great horned owl--often fall out of the nest before they can fend for themselves and that the parents take care of them anyway. So Ryan trekked back to the northern part of the forest and left little Herman (I named him Herman) in a tree close to where he found him. We hope he's still doing well and look forward to seeing him swoop around the forest someday after mice and juvenile ground squirrels.
You know how the old saying goes: A bird in the hand...
is worth one in the hat?
Too cute!
