We continue to be amazed at Elliot’s vocabulary. There are so many words he knows which I don’t know where he learned. “Drowned”? (He has known that for a long time now).

Here’s a conversation between me, Karolina, and Sam — one of Elliot’s preschool teachers.

Elliot loves to lick the salt off of pretzels. He hands the pretzel back to me when the salt is gone and asks for another.

And pickle spears? He loves them, too, he just eats the seeds out of the center and hands the rest back to me.

Annoying Orange during din-din.

Yesterday. I carried up Elliot from the Garden PreSchool to the car in the parking lot. He pointed at something on the ground, at a distance and kept saying “Eight! Eight! Eight!”.

I looked in the direction he was pointing and did not see anything. But he kept persisting, “Eight! Eight! Eight!”. So I looked again and saw this overturned Lego piece. I was about to say, “Oh, that’s just a Lego piece” when I realized that it is in fact also the figure eight.

I love moments where my child can show me the world in a different light, a light I’d never seen before. Maxi did that for me a lot, too.

I taught Elliot the word “bar code” a few weeks ago. Whenever he goes shopping with me, he wants to ring up the items at the cash register. One day he pointed to the stripes and said “What’s this?”. Now he says bar code everytime he sees one and loves to hear the beep when the barcode is scanned.

I finished this book on Sunday, my second Steinbeck book in a year (the previous one was “East of Eden”). What a marvelous book that really helps me to understand where workers’ rights came from in this country.

A couple of days ago we were reading Splat the Cat and Elliot said, “What’s this?”. I said Splat is dreaming. Dreams are pictures or stories when you sleep.

A couple days later, he awoke from his afternoon nap and said “Dreaming!” I asked what pictures he saw. He told me, but o couldn’t understand.

Date unknown but I’m sometime Winter 2020 based on the hat and coat.

Hi guys. Elliot has been doing so awesome with potty training at school! If you would like to start sending him to school in underwear instead of a diaper, we are definitely ok with that! He’s been doing an awesome job of staying dry and telling us when he needs to go. 
Also, he’s doing so well on his letters! Today he was using magnet pieces to make letters, then telling me what letter he made. 
-Ms. Sam and Ms. Bella 

Elliot first peed in the toilet on Monday, Nov 23, 2020. We all cheered!

This morning he told me he had to poop when we were about to leave for school. Of course I rushed him upstairs, undressed him, etc. Nothing happened, and I think he just did it as a stalling tactic.

Last night, 15 days later, he said to me in bed “poop!”. I rushed him to his training toilet and pulled down his pants. He pooped. I called Karolina and Max. We cheered and danced and celebrated. Elliot was elated and wanted to poop again.

We use 3 or 4 quarters to get candy in this machine. Then I say we have no more big coins, only small ones. So Elliot goes to the fountain in the background and plucks out a quarter and runs back to the gumball machine.

Little 2-year old thief!

I was laughing but also impressed that he knew which coin to take — there were pennies, nickles, dimes, and quarters. And of course I was always impressed that he thought to take one from the fountain, a demonstration of spontaneous inductive reasoning.