Studio711.com – Ben Martens

There are so many times during the day when I stare at Elijah and wonder what he’s thinking. He jabbers all the time, but what is he telling us? He picked up some baby sign language pretty early on (“more”, “all done”, “milk”) but now he’s building up his verbal vocabulary too. Here’s a list of what he has under his belt so far:

In fairness, some of these words are only distinguishable in context by Tyla and I but others are decipherable by the general public.

The list of words he understands is much bigger. I’m always talking to him, and sometimes I’m amazed at the complicated instructions he can actually follow. For example, one day I said, “Can you please pick up this piece of paper and throw it into the trash can?” I turned my back not expecting him to do it and when I looked again, he was toddling over to the trash can across the room. One of our favorites is that he understand “May I please have a hug?” Sometimes he’ll say “No”, but that’s fine because it just makes the hugs more enjoyable.

Every year we get one new ornament that commemorates some part of the year. I forgot to write about it this year, but that’s kind of fitting because we forgot to BUY it too! We had meant to pick one up on our family trip down to Portland but ended up buying it from Etsy later in the year.

You can view our previous ornaments here, here, here, and here. It’s fun to have a tree that tells the story of our family!

Thanksgiving seems like a good time to give an update on our Little Man who isn’t so little anymore. Elijah is now 17 months old. When he’s awake, he’s jabbering almost non-stop. We can’t understand 99% of what he’s saying but that doesn’t deter him. We can pick out a few words like woof, car, quack, daddy, etc. His best one is probably “thank you.” He’s really gotten the hang of this and even says it at the appropriate times. For example, if you take him to the grocery store, he says thank you every time the bagger puts a bag in our cart.

He walks quite fast now and can almost keep up a normal/slow adult pace for brief periods. He stops not because he gets tired, but because there are so many interesting things to see. Every plane that crossed the sky requires him to stop and point. We live in the normal landing pattern for SeaTac so this happens every few minutes.

He still hasn’t slept through the night and only has slept for more than 4 hours straight a couple times in his life. We go through periods where he wakes up between 5 and 5:30. Nighttime has probably been the toughest part of being a parent for me. I’m awesome at sleeping so I don’t know who he inherited this from.

Coming home is a treat for me as Elijah now recognizes the sound of the garage door and usually comes  running to the door to great me with a big smile! I love you, Little Man! And I love you too, Tyla. We’re raising an awesome kid!

My son loves to play with water from hoses and tubes. While watching him splash around in the tub the other night, I got an idea for some PVC toys. A quick search revealed that lots of other people have had this revelation too. Here’s how to make your own set:

The project is simple. Grab an assortment of PVC elbows and T’s from your home improvement store. I chose 2” but go with whatever looks good to you. They’re a couple bucks each so you might want to start small and see if you like the idea before buying a bunch of them. While you’re there, pick up a some suction cups. I found them over by the picture hanging hardware. The little ones that hold 1 pound each work fine.

Drill two or three holes in each PVC piece that’s just big enough to hold the suction cup. I then used white Gorilla glue to hold them in place because that’s what I had on hand. So far it is holding up to tugs and pulls.

Once the glue has set, stick them to your tub wall and pour water in them. It’s not perfect but with a little practice you can get water to fall from piece to piece. I might also pick up some tubing to connect them, but this is plenty of fun for now.

There have been a lot of surprises and lessons learned from being a first-time parent. One of the biggest that I keep coming back to is how impossible it is to apply the scientific method to parenting. The scientific method basically says that you ask a question, do some research, construct a hypothesis, test it with experiments, analyze your data and then draw conclusions. Surely solving a parenting challenge could be approached the same way?

In theory, yes, it would work, but when you’re only dealing with even just one kid, the problems come at you so fast that it’s impossible to isolate one problem at a time and experiment with solutions. Your child isn’t sleeping well? Try making the room warmer or colder, putting him to bed sooner or later, feeding him more or less during the day or at night, sleeping with white noise or without noise, and the list goes on and on. The first night you pick one experiment and try it. Ok that didn’t work. But before you can try the next experiment on your list, you have a new set of problems like your kid missed a nap or your kid is teething, etc. The experiments start compounding until it feels like you’re just struggling to keep up, much less making any progress on the problems. And even if something you try does work one day, it doesn’t mean it will ever work again. Or just because it didn’t work today, it doesn’t mean it won’t work tomorrow. Instead of driving the boat, it’s easy to feel like you’re getting dragged behind it.

So far the only “solution” I’ve found is to just go with the flow as much as you can. Pick your battles and let the rest slide. Ignore the mountains of “advice” that come from every book, website, and Facebook post and do what you need to do to survive and raise a healthy, well-behaved child. If you succeed then you did it right.

It’s been nine months since I wrote the last “Elijah Update” post! I’m not even going to attempt to recap what has happened since that last post, but I’ll give you a summary of what’s going on in his life recently.

Tyla and Elijah keep pretty busy throughout the week. The main scheduled activities are Parent/Baby group, Stroller Strides, and Little Gym. They’ve also started swimming a little bit and will be starting swim classes later this year.

He’s gaining new motor skills every week and on Sunday he took his first steps! Tyla’s family happened to be at our house when Elijah let go of his little push toy and took about 5 tiny steps toward the grill. That’s my boy! You can see him thinking really hard about each movement to take a step and he still needs to build up his confidence, but I bet he’ll make rapid progress in the coming days and weeks. Lots of people says “Keep him as a crawler as long as you can” and stuff like that but I’m excited to have my little man walking! Yes, it’s more work, but by now I’ve figured out that being a parent isn’t something you do because it’s easy.

Elijah was really quiet for his first few months but now he’s always making some kind of noise. There was a period of shrieking which (I hope) is passed, at least for now. He loves to babble and make seemingly random noises and will sometimes even imitate our coughs and achoos. When he’s really excited, he kind of turns his tongue sideways and makes a sucking sound.

Milk is still the main food of the day but he’s experimenting with other foods that Tyla and I eat. He sits in his high chair for most of our meals and does some combination of smearing it on his face, dropping it down his bib, and putting it in his mouth. I don’t think he’s quite made the connection that this type of eating will also solve his hunger pains.

Night times are still a battle though we’ve kind of settled into a workable truce for now. We’re going on 11 months of not sleeping more than 3-4 hours in a row except for a couple somewhat random stretches when he was very young. This is probably the single most painful part of parenting for me (and I’m not even the one who has to stay awake to feed him!) and I’m praying that we get to a better spot soon.

We’re very blessed to have such a wonderful child in our home!

What do you do when your wonderful wife is having her first Mother’s Day? Celebrate! The party started on Friday night with New York Strip steak from the butcher. It’s the fanciest piece of meat that we’ve purchased from them yet and wow it was good! Saturday morning Tyla got to sleep in for a couple hours and then she took Elijah to a craft fair. We spent the afternoon walking around our neighborhood’s garage sales and found some great purchases. Dinner on Saturday night was one of Tyla’s favorite foods: sushi! On Sunday morning Tyla ran the 5k that she’s been doing for the past years (though she skipped it last year when she was pregnant.) After a long nap from Elijah, during which I washed Tyla’s car, we had her family over for lunch (grilled beef dogs and brats from the butcher). While we were grilling, Elijah took his first steps! Dessert was a giant cookie cake from Mrs. Fields.

I hope you had a special weekend! Elijah and I love you!

Tyla is good at entertaining Elijah and making him smile. Here is some video of her at the work party on Saturday.