and one from just now:
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So much improvement since the beginning 
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Her facial expression is great!
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My observational drawing skills are doing pretty well, but I’ve been seriously neglecting constructional drawing, so I’m going back to the bare bones of constructional for a bit.
This was a 5 minute sketch, my new baby permitting I need to do both constitutional drawing and observational in a session
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Night + day to your sketches when not focusing on construction (I assume).
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Somehow your sketch of the pose looks more pleasing to me than the reference. 
Draw the baby. That way you can work on sketches and tell your wife you’re keeping an close eye on it. 
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I very often have her strapped to my chest while drawing, or I’m holding a bottle with one hand and a pencil with the other. (Baby, not wife 
)
Speaking of, two quick gesture sketches:
They’re not pretty, but they’re fast, loose, and construction-oriented, so that’s what matters. Hopefully I’ll have a moment to do some observational as well
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Gesture:
Not super accurate, but it captures the major points and the overall form, which is important.
I drew from this same picture back in December. It took an hour and was far too involved in the details. I also definitely traced parts, something I haven’t done in months. Today’s attempt took 15 minutes and used much longer, freer, strokes. So that’s progress for sure. If I put the same amount of time in again, I bet the result would be remarkable.
The old one:
Then I tried this- I was trying to be loose and fast, which I was, but somehow I screwed up royally with the proportions:
Oh well. Little better day by day
On the hard surface front, SVD:
Factory SVDs have 10 round magazines, this one has a hand-made 20. It’s post-apocalyptic concept art for something you’ll see someday
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An exercise we did at class was to use crayon on a large newsprint pad for these observation drawings using several techniques to break us from trying to draw with rigid choppy sketch marks. We started with doing repeating ovals to describe the positive shapes, then we did the don’t pick up your hand eye on the subject for awhile, then we went back to looking but using loose long lines first to get the shapes we saw. After all that, then we began learning to measure and build from an armature using s curve gestures. Shoulders to hips and all the way to the foot would tell on us if we stopped observing and worked from our expectations.
These are all looking good, except if you want to work hard surface you need straight lines and they taught us to fold paper 2x to make reusable straight edges - and if you haven’t seen the trick using tacks and rubber bands for perspective, look it up as it simplifies the ability to draft edges. That gun could be awesome if it had parallel lines and cleaner lines. Keep going, this is a good thread to follow.
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Funnily enough I don’t see your “screw ups” in the second study. The opposite. When you’re not tracing, it seems, you’re way more accurate in capturing the proportions and forms.
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I’m pretty sure your top one is actually saluting us.
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I’d suggest doing an overlay of your drawing over the reference to examine what is going on with your perception versus what you are trying to observe and remodel, it is very important to work on realistic foreshortening and measurements of the model parts.
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I usually try to, my impatient and high-maintenance 3month old keeps interrupting me before I get to it these days 
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