Elijah turned 3!
(last month...)
I am always so far behind on all my blog posts but that's ok because they are just for me. I just want to be able to revisit as many little happy memories of my family and our life together as I possibly can.
Elijah turned 3 on the 30th of October. It seemed like we talked about it with him forever and now it's already been over a month! He's a tall skinny little rascal with the cutest tiniest little bum. I love how the features of kids are so obvious when the are little because you are staring at just like this miniature human. I can't ever imagine not having him in our home and him not having that delicious red hair.
Elijah loves to play with his sister all the time and takes on whatever interests she has at the current moment. He stepped right into that dinosaur love when he was getting older and finding his own way to play with toys, but is now adapting to Pokemon play since that is the current interest of his sister. His grandma told me that when he comes over he likes to play with her dolls which makes me laugh because I would never know that since we don't have any lying around our house. I did notice however that when I knit my little bears and bunnies that it is Elijah who seems to gravitate to them much more than Olive does. The thing with little kids is that they can imagine whatever they want to be whatever they want, and so as we don't currently have many Pokemon toys in the house the kids just pretend their dinosaurs are Pokemon and that suits them just fine.
Elijah is very affectionate. Both my kids are. I think I have cultivated that in them and sometimes it's a little too much but at the same time oh how I love it so. I know it won't last forever. He is always, ALWAYS touching our faces. The first thing he does in the morning when he wakes up is crawl into bed and start rubbing your face. He is always grabbing our faces in his two hands and doing this funny little grit teethed shake. He strokes my cheek and says "Awww, you're so cute." It makes me laugh because it is an obvious reflection of something I say to him about 50 times a day. He loves to snuggle and asks us to snuggle him while he watches a show or read a book. It always makes me feel good to pick him up and give him a tight squeeze.
Elijah is a good eater. It's funny because as a baby he was pickier than Olive but he has way surpassed her in his palette at this point and will eat pretty much anything, and loves to eat salad. Both my children love seafood, which has made me a very proud parent. However, he is still a typical child because his favorite thing to eat is Macaroni and Cheese and he talks about eating it every night in his prayers. I finally got him potty trained after a big potty training failure (on my part.) I was very hard on him the first time I tried to train him because I thought it would just come so naturally since he had started to poop in the potty on his own so early. When he had accidents I came down too hard on him for them because I was frustrated that he had peed 5 seconds after I had taken him off the potty. I wasn't giving him a chance to learn. After that he really didn't want to even try no matter what incentive I offered him, and I was feeling perplexed about it until it finally dawned on me that maybe he didn't want to do it because it had made him feel bad. So I ask him if that was the reason, if he didn't want to do it because I had yelled him. He said it was. I told him I would not yell at him anymore and he agreed to do it and was pretty much completely potty trained within a few days. It was a good life lesson for me. And now I just love it when he sits his little body on that big toilet and the way he ducks his head down to watch himself go poop. It's so funny.
Elijah is very good at going to bed and hardly ever gets up after we put him down. Occasionally he will get up once or twice, stand in the hall for a minute until we see him and then get this big grin and runs right back into his bed. It makes me smile every time. Every night I say prayers with him and sing him two songs. Both versions of "twinkle twinkle little star" and "I often go walking." I rub his head and we talk about the fun things that we should do the next day. These are the little moments I treasure. It used to be hard to get Elijah to sleep when he was a baby but just like his eating patterns he has really adapted to fit our somewhat nomadic lifestyle and sleep well on cars or planes safely tucked into my arms.
When I picture Elijah in my head I see his little run and can hear his pitter patter coming down the hall. He loves to play a game he has entitled "mean guy" where I chase them around the house and try to grab them and put them on the couch or on the bed. He asks me to be a "mean guy" at least once a day. Lately they have adapted it into their Pokemon play and I have been dubbed "Team Rocket" which are the bad guys in Pokemon and they are any number of Pokemon but usually Pikachu and Snorlax. It can be such an exhausting and physically demanding game, especially now that Olive is so big, but the kids love it so much I can't help but oblige as often as I can. He loves the show Dinosaur Train and begs to watch it all the time. We listen to the soundtrack in the car and I love to hear him sing all the songs in the back (sometimes I'm allowed to join in sometimes I'm not.) As a family we often play Zingo or Go Fish and it's fun to have them at an age where they enjoy and can play games. Elijah has his own version to every game but it usually makes us smile and laugh the whole way through. He loves to play memory with me and often it's just a matter of searching for the match than finding it. He always shouts out each new card he gets in Go Fish or lays out all his cards, which is just hilarious, and he will often just flip his Zingo board right in the middle of a game and decide he needs to start a new one. It's fun because he doesn't take the "winning" part so seriously and of course Olive is very sensitive to winning and so it makes everything work out well.
Elijah is an absolute joy in our family. He makes me so happy to be a mother and gives me love and affection everyday. His spirit of kindness is contagious in every way. He keeps me laughing at all the rascally things he does, like telling me to "go away" so he can do something naughty he isn't supposed to do. He makes a perfect fit to our family and I could not imagine life without him. Love you Elijah Chick Atkinson, love you more than words can say.
Elijah is very affectionate. Both my kids are. I think I have cultivated that in them and sometimes it's a little too much but at the same time oh how I love it so. I know it won't last forever. He is always, ALWAYS touching our faces. The first thing he does in the morning when he wakes up is crawl into bed and start rubbing your face. He is always grabbing our faces in his two hands and doing this funny little grit teethed shake. He strokes my cheek and says "Awww, you're so cute." It makes me laugh because it is an obvious reflection of something I say to him about 50 times a day. He loves to snuggle and asks us to snuggle him while he watches a show or read a book. It always makes me feel good to pick him up and give him a tight squeeze.
Elijah is a good eater. It's funny because as a baby he was pickier than Olive but he has way surpassed her in his palette at this point and will eat pretty much anything, and loves to eat salad. Both my children love seafood, which has made me a very proud parent. However, he is still a typical child because his favorite thing to eat is Macaroni and Cheese and he talks about eating it every night in his prayers. I finally got him potty trained after a big potty training failure (on my part.) I was very hard on him the first time I tried to train him because I thought it would just come so naturally since he had started to poop in the potty on his own so early. When he had accidents I came down too hard on him for them because I was frustrated that he had peed 5 seconds after I had taken him off the potty. I wasn't giving him a chance to learn. After that he really didn't want to even try no matter what incentive I offered him, and I was feeling perplexed about it until it finally dawned on me that maybe he didn't want to do it because it had made him feel bad. So I ask him if that was the reason, if he didn't want to do it because I had yelled him. He said it was. I told him I would not yell at him anymore and he agreed to do it and was pretty much completely potty trained within a few days. It was a good life lesson for me. And now I just love it when he sits his little body on that big toilet and the way he ducks his head down to watch himself go poop. It's so funny.
Elijah is very good at going to bed and hardly ever gets up after we put him down. Occasionally he will get up once or twice, stand in the hall for a minute until we see him and then get this big grin and runs right back into his bed. It makes me smile every time. Every night I say prayers with him and sing him two songs. Both versions of "twinkle twinkle little star" and "I often go walking." I rub his head and we talk about the fun things that we should do the next day. These are the little moments I treasure. It used to be hard to get Elijah to sleep when he was a baby but just like his eating patterns he has really adapted to fit our somewhat nomadic lifestyle and sleep well on cars or planes safely tucked into my arms.
When I picture Elijah in my head I see his little run and can hear his pitter patter coming down the hall. He loves to play a game he has entitled "mean guy" where I chase them around the house and try to grab them and put them on the couch or on the bed. He asks me to be a "mean guy" at least once a day. Lately they have adapted it into their Pokemon play and I have been dubbed "Team Rocket" which are the bad guys in Pokemon and they are any number of Pokemon but usually Pikachu and Snorlax. It can be such an exhausting and physically demanding game, especially now that Olive is so big, but the kids love it so much I can't help but oblige as often as I can. He loves the show Dinosaur Train and begs to watch it all the time. We listen to the soundtrack in the car and I love to hear him sing all the songs in the back (sometimes I'm allowed to join in sometimes I'm not.) As a family we often play Zingo or Go Fish and it's fun to have them at an age where they enjoy and can play games. Elijah has his own version to every game but it usually makes us smile and laugh the whole way through. He loves to play memory with me and often it's just a matter of searching for the match than finding it. He always shouts out each new card he gets in Go Fish or lays out all his cards, which is just hilarious, and he will often just flip his Zingo board right in the middle of a game and decide he needs to start a new one. It's fun because he doesn't take the "winning" part so seriously and of course Olive is very sensitive to winning and so it makes everything work out well.
Elijah is an absolute joy in our family. He makes me so happy to be a mother and gives me love and affection everyday. His spirit of kindness is contagious in every way. He keeps me laughing at all the rascally things he does, like telling me to "go away" so he can do something naughty he isn't supposed to do. He makes a perfect fit to our family and I could not imagine life without him. Love you Elijah Chick Atkinson, love you more than words can say.
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