catch up

January has been busy so far. We celebrated the New Year with our Belarussian/American friends. The tradition in Belarus is to have a big meal at midnight and stay up well into the morning. We adjusted that a little because Justin had to work the next morning. We enjoyed catching up with these special friends! Ladies first: Vera Foushee, yours truly, Lauren Metelski, and hostess Heather Morozov.



The guys: Val Morozov, Yura Metelski, Justin, and Lovell Foushee.



On New Year's Day, we watched the Rose Bowl. Owen was really rooting for Penn State (his grandpa's and Aunt Beth's alma mater) and was devastated when they lost! He was really cute in his outfit though. :)



On January 5, Justin turned 28!



Then somewhere in there, Lewis got really into a book his Aunt Beth gave him last summer called "Book." It's about a boy who gets a book and loves it so much. One thing the boy does is wear the book like a hat. For a while every time we turned around we saw Lewis like this!



He's picked up a few more signs recently: mom, dad, train, animal, napkin, and he's working on grandpa. He's just about got it.

We're getting ready to start his ABA program, and we're looking very forward to seeing how it goes. Lewis has gotten really good at identifying objects in pictures and can point out all the letters of the alphabet in order. He also knows all his numbers and all his colors, including some random ones from his new 16 pack of crayons like turquoise and maroon. He's definitely a very visual learner because he learned to identify about 50 foods after showing him on flashcards just once. He doesn't want to eat these foods, but he can identify them perfectly every time.