We have a great walk down memory lane when we put up our Christmas tree because every year, we buy an ornament on our family vacation. This year’s ornament was purchased at the San Diego Zoo. It’s actually a magnet, but it works as an ornament too!
You can see our past ornaments in these posts: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2008-2010
Elijah is almost two and a half years old now! It’s rare that a day goes by without Tyla and I looking at each other and saying “Where did he learn that?” He’s picking things up so quickly! He recently discovered a love for Legos. We’re starting him out on the regular Legos and skipping right over Duplos, but that doesn’t seem to bother him. He mostly likes to point at things in the book and ask us to build them for him, but he has started trying to construct things on his own. For a couple days he was carrying around something and we couldn’t understand what he said it was. Finally Tyla deciphered that he said it was a “motor home.” So there you go Future Elijah. The first Lego project you thought up and built yourself was a motor home.
His memory is incredible. He quickly picks up lots of songs that we sing to him. You never know what he’ll start singing as you are walking through a store. His favorites right now are the Doxology (Praise God from whom all blessings flow…), the ABCs, Zacchaeus, and Deep and Wide. The other morning I had “Momma’s Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” stuck in my head and I guess I was singing it a lot because later that morning I heard him singing it while playing with Legos. He also has the common table prayer memorized and when he’s really hungry, you’ll find him in his chair saying the prayer as a hint to us that it’s time to eat.
Elijah is getting to a good age for me to get work done around the house with him. In fact, if he knows I’m going out in the garage to work, I usually shut the door and hear him crying behind me. He loves to follow me around whether it’s woodworking or working in the yard. The other day he told me, “We need to fix this house. It’s basically falling down.”
Having a two year old running around the house is a challenge, but I love this little man! He’s got a great personality and it’s awesome to see his world growing day by day.
A trip to a pumpkin patch is an annual tradition for us. This year we went back to Bob’s Corn and Pumpkin Farm. Elijah loved the hayride because we got to sit up from by the tractor. We didn’t even get off at the end. We just took the round trip. They also have a nice playground, small petting zoo and pony rides. If you’re into fall foods, they have plenty to choose from: apple and pumpkin donuts, kettle corn, BBQ, etc. For the bigger kids (umm… and me…) they have three pretty big air canons that shoot apples. All in all it was a great morning but I’m glad we got there early. It was getting really busy when we left.
For a long time, Tyla has wanted to rent a house on a lake to spend time playing with Oskar (and oh yeah, the rest of the family too.) We booked it early this year. Unfortunately we had to put Oskar down before we made it to the cabin, but the vacation must go on!
So Tyla, Elijah, and I headed to Lake Cavanaugh with Tyla’s family. Booking it in mid-September, we really didn’t know what kind of weather we were going to have. We were very blessed to have 80 degree sunshine the whole weekend! It was perfect for swimming and boating in the provided canoe and kayak.
The house was a VRBO rental and it could easily have handled twice as many people. Elijah loved playing foosball, ping pong, air hockey and pool. The house was great!
I had never heard of the lake before this, but I was really impressed. It’s only about 1.5 hours from our house (northeast of Arlington, WA) and even though it’s close, it feels very secluded. The lake water is VERY clean and the lake is big enough to easily support a lot of people skiing and tubing. The only downside is that the lots are very narrow so the houses and docks are really crammed together.
We made a lot of great memories that weekend. It also happened to be my birthday so this was a pretty great way to spend a birthday. I hope we’ll be able to visit the lake again!
I use that word “vacation” lightly. It’s true that I wasn’t at my normal day job, but I spent the trip doing more physical labor each day than I normally do in a week (or a month!)
Dad and Mom already have a two car garage, but they are adding on to the end of it to have a nice shop work space and another garage bay to hold their tractors. It will be a huge win for them to keep their Allis Chalmers WD45 in the garage instead of under a tarp near the woods. Other than having the foundation poured, Dad is doing almost all of the work by himself. It’s a huge undertaking and this was a fun opportunity to make some memories with him.
Luke, Rachel and David were there for the first couple days. It was fun to see Elijah and David interacting together. They’re the only cousins they have and they rarely get to see each other. David is 7 years older than Elijah so Elijah was pretty excited to hang out with David. The reverse probably wasn’t always true!
Elijah was in tractor heaven. Mom and Dad have three tractors: the big orange Allis Chalmers, a John Deere lawn and garden tractor that they got in 1981 and a newer John Deere mower that they got recently from GrandpaH. On top of that, a neighbor stopped by with his big John Deere 3320 tractor with a bucket on the front. That one came in really handy for getting material up to the roof. Elijah had a ball riding ALL of them multiple times. It was part of his daily routine and now that we’re home, he still talks about it and he uses a blanket to cover his tractors just like my Dad puts a tarp over some of his tractors.
Dad, Luke and I made great progress on the project. When I arrived, there was no roof. When I left, we had started the shingles. Dad and I both thought we’d have been farther along than that, but being novices meant that we did a lot of things twice. We kept joking that when we build the next garage, things will go a lot faster.
It was a great week. The weather mostly cooperated and nobody got hurt. Mom and Dad have continued the shingling work and are probably going to be done by the time you read this. That will be a huge step in the project. Next up will be finishing off the front wall and getting the windows and doors in. If Dad can get the building wrapped and the siding up before winter, that would be a huge win, but he’s just taking it as it comes. There’s a lot to learn along the way!
I set up the GoPro every single day and ran it all day long. I’ll do another post about how to handle these super long timelapses, but for now you can just enjoy the results.
We have a lot of interactions during the day whether it’s with family, coworkers, cashiers, online people, etc. They all demand some level of civility and good behavior. But over the course of a week, who gets the best you have to offer? I wish I could remember where I first heard this, but whoever said it, it stuck in my mind. Their point was that instead of letting go and giving our spouse (or family, etc) the rest of whatever we have to give that day, we should be giving them our best. We might rationalize it by saying, “My spouse knows me better than anyone else so he/she knows I don’t really mean it when I let me bad mood run wild.” But flip that over… if you have a limited amount of good behavior to dish out, shouldn’t you give it to the people you love the most? Save your best for your spouse.
Of course that’s easier said than done. We usually see our spouse at the end of the day when we’re really tired and fed up with all the other interactions we had during the day. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not a great idea.
I suppose ideally we’d have infinite good behavior to dish out to everyone we see, but even if you are nice to everyone, you can’t reasonably go the extra mile for everyone. Save that extra effort for the ones you love the most! Don’t use that close relationship to dump them with the leftovers of your day.
UPDATE: I wrote this before hearing Pastor’s sermon last Sunday, but it fit this post very well. One key tagline from his sermon was “You’d die for your spouse, but do you live for them?”
Tyla and Elijah found Edmonds Marina Beach Park and they were both very excited about it. Elijah particularly loved it because the park features:
The fork lifts probably trumped all the rest. They store quite a few boats on racks on land and then forklifts put them in the water. It’s quite a process and Elijah can watch them for a long time without getting bored.
One Saturday a few weeks ago, I went along with them to check out the park. I think it’s going to be a regular spot for us. The park really is beautiful and there are a lot of things for Elijah to enjoy.
Tyla has wanted to visit the Outback Kangaroo Farm in Arlington for quite a while, so her birthday seemed like a good excuse to go. You pay $10/person an get a one hour tour around their facility. Imagine if someone you knew bought a kangaroo. And then another. And then 10 more. And then they bought some alpacas, lamas, donkeys, goats, tortoises, lemurs, peacocks, mini horses, ostriches and emus to go with them. You’d have the Outback Kangaroo Farm.
On the tour you get to feed and pet a lot of the animals. Tyla loved it and Elijah had fun too, though you can imagine that those animals look a lot bigger to him so he was a bit nervous at times.
It was a fun experience but probably not one that we need to repeat on a regular basis. It’s a great place to see some animals that you don’t normally see in the Pacific Northwest. And oh yeah, feeding the alpaca is done by putting a piece of food in your mouth and letting them kiss you…
Since Elijah was born, it has been really easy for us to get into a rut of trading off watching him on the weekends and “getting stuff done.” While that is important, it’s also important to take time to grow together as family. This past weekend, I surprised Tyla by suggesting a trip to the zoo. I’m pretty sure she’d go every day if she could, but I’m usually the holdout.
The day was a bit wet and cool (the opposite of everything we’ve had for the last two months), but that was good because it meant that the crowds were really low and the animals were very active. When it’s hot, they just hide away in the shade. Every single exhibit we visited featured very active animals! Elijah knew a bunch of animals that he wanted to see and impressed me by walking through the pretty big tunnel by the meerkat exhibit. He’s really interested in tunnels right now so that was a big hit. If you ask him what he did at the zoo, he says “Walk through tunnel!”
The zoo no longer has elephants, but the new (to me anyway) tiger exhibit was pretty impressive. The zoo also has some lion cubs that were born last fall and they were really playful while we were there.
We only stayed about 2.5 hours because he has been getting up so early and was ready for a nap, but it was a good family event.
Our little man turns two today! He changes week to week, so looking back over an entire year is quite a trip. The biggest change we’ve seen lately is his ability to combine more and more words together into fragments or even full sentences. It’s so fun to understand a little more about what is going on in his thoughts. We love you Elijah!
