Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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!

We love you Tyla! Elijah and I made a video for you.

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.