One of my greatest fatherly accomplishments of the last couple weeks was teaching Eli the difference between trucks and airplanes, and the fact that even though airplanes have wheels, they don’t actually drive on the ground like trucks do.
Here he is showing how he flies his red airplane. The sounds he makes are either a buzzing airplane engine noise, or a short high pitched squeal, which I can only imagine are the passengers screaming for their lives. He demonstrates both here.
Eli’s new car seat came in a box – a fairly decent sized box. What does any kid do with a new box? He makes a fort out of it. Of course, Eli isn’t capable of making forts yet so mom and dad helped him. His new car seat box clubhouse is one of his new favorite toys, and he and his kitty Lucy hang out in there a lot. Generally not at the same time though, otherwise this happens.
Once Eli turned a year old he was cleared by the doc to graduate to a forward facing car seat. It’s been wonderful, for him and for us. Now we don’t have to perform a contortionist event to feed him Cheerios while driving down the interstate at 70 miles per hour. Eli likes looking forward too, and his new forward facing seat makes him feel like he’s driving… so of course he makes his driving noise while we go down the road.
Remember that E*Trade commercial where the guy’s playing the lottery and loses? The baby turns and says, “I wanna show you something. It’s my shocked face”. This is Eli’s version:
A few months ago Eli said his first word, which was “hot”. His first word was “hot” because he would always crawl towards the oven and try to clamber up inside it, and we would say “No Eli, that’s hot”. Then we’d scoot him back, and he’d cry. The same thing would happen with the firstplace. He would try to get inside the fireplace and we would say, “Please don’t do that Eli. That’s hot”. Then we’d scoot him back. Then he’d cry.
Not all of Eli’s adventures end in crying. I promise.
Anyways, it got to the point that anything we would tell him “no” about he would associate with being hot. So now he believes he’s not supposed to climb the stairs alone because it’s hot. He’s not supposed to throw his peas onto the floor because it’s hot. Today he was banging both hands, covered in spaghetti sauce, on the dining room table and I said, “Eli, no”. And he looked at me with wide eyes, and shook his head up and down, and emphatically said, “HOT!”
We had a fun weekend celebrating Eli’s birthday with family and friends. Thanks to everyone who helped us remember Eli’s first year and for all the love and support you’ve shared with us over the last 12 months.
One of Eli’s favorite books that he has loved since he was just a little guy is a counting book called “Fish Eyes”. Like most kids books it features ten pages with an incrementally increasing number of animals on each page so you can learn how to count to 10. In this case, fish is the animal of choice… you probably already got there though. So we decided to throw Eli a fish themed party, complete with cut out paper fishes and a swimming take-home party favor for every guest… that is, a goldfish. Here are some decoration and party pics from the day – many special thanks to our unofficial, yet somewhat official, family photographer Meg for pictures.
In keeping with the theme of the party, our birthday present to Eli was a new goldfish! We took suggestions from party-goers to find a name for our new family fish, and the winning entry was: Ned! Whenever we say to Eli, “Where’s your fishy?” he looks at Ned’s bowl and says, “Blub blub blub”. Here he is…
As I’m sitting here writing this tonight I’m remembering that exactly 1 year ago to the minute I was running around the house like a madman throwing things in the car while this was going on upstairs. Looking back, in that moment, I could not have imagined that Elijah was less than an hour of away from being born. How we made it to the hospital in time, I’ll never know. By the grace of God only.
And tomorrow Eli will be one year old! We can’t believe how quickly this last year has gone by, and how many changes we’ve seen flash before our eyes. iPhoto says we have 6,953 pictures of Eli that we’ve taken in the last year. I’ll spare you most of those and leave you with these 13; one from his birthday, and one from each month thereafter.
There’s a grand party on the books for this weekend to celebrate Eli’s first year with family and friends. And we’re excited for many more years to come!
We had a fun time visiting family and friends over Christmas this year, and I think we saw pretty much everyone we could have possibly seen. Eli enjoyed his first Christmas and all that goes with is – tearing open presents, eating tissue paper, enjoying bows and ribbons over the toys he received – you know, all that stuff.
On top of all the holiday bustle we also squeezed in a wedding and a first birthday for Eli’s cousin, Cole. That’s a lot of fun, and a lot of miles on the road, for three weeks! We’re still recovering!
Only regret? Absolutely no snow – hardly a flake – in our entire time in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Of course it snowed up there the day after we got home.
