The Cook Family Adventure Blog: Spring has sprung 2017. Elli turns 2!

Well, its been an interesting and action packed couple months. Life continues at a non-stop pace.

Interestingly, Elliot basically potty-trained herself in Hawaii at 22 months. While hiking she refused to pee in her diapers, prompting us to have to teach her to pee in the woods. After we returned home from vacation, Elliot began to use the potty with a fair degree of regularity. While she hasn't quit mastered staying dry at night yet and is hit/miss with poops (she is only 2), she is reliably enough with pees that she spends all day out of diapers. This generally results in mom, dad or both getting peed on. Oh the joys of parenting....

She celebrated her 2nd birthday in May in a rolling birthday celebration that spanned nearly a week. This all started on her actual birthday (5/10) when she has a quiet celebration with mom and dad. This escalated that weekend when Grandma and Grandpa Cook joined us all for a polka-dot birthday party. Elliot got to eat her selection of Elliot sized snacks (which she loved) and was amazed at the number of balloons that filled the house. Crystal did an amazing job building her a reading teepee that she LOVES!!! Dad and Elliot now end every day that he is home reading in the teepee in a special Elliot hiding place. Mom also sanctioned a small trampoline which has resulted in very frequent cries of "jump...jump..JUMP..SWING!!!!" filling the house as Elliot learns that she is quite the acrobat.

After her 2nd birthday, Elliot and Crystal then joined Grandma Weis in Las Vegas for birthday celebration #3. While Crystal attended an emergency medicine conference, Elliot and Grandma Weis explored Las Vegas. Apparently the children's museum is just amazing!

After a final trip down to Portland to meet the interim chairman, Mac signed a contract to return to OHSU as a trauma / critical care surgeon. Crystal and Mac have been spending an awful lot of time on house hunting website trying to organize the next big move for out little family. While we haven't found the perfect house yet, getting the mortgage pre-approval set up and figuring out how to work with realtors in another city have shown us that buying a house is a pain in the butt.

Crystal is getting VERY pregnant at this point (39 weeks!) and little baby boy Cook (who isn't so little anymore) is getting ready to join the world. Elliot seems to understand that baby brother is in mommy's tummy and that he is going to be coming out soon for her to meet. Switching from a crib to a big girl bed was a bit traumatic for her (wait...I can get out of bed at night a destroy my room? Tell me more...), getting ready for baby now seems to be something that Elliot sort of understands. This gets translated into an intense love for Zoe, her doll / baby. Elliot can often be found wrapping Zoe in dish towels (Zoe blanket), putting her in in the stroller (Zoe walk) and then trying to get her to sleep in her room (Zoe pillow...Zoe blanket). The maternal instinct is already manifesting.

In baby development news, Elliot is now > 70% percentile for height and weight and >90% for head circumference (thanks Mac....). She has turned into quite the little talker. She now pretty routinely says 3-4 word sentences and we are able to understand close to 80% of what she says. We spent the first 2 years of her life wondering what sort of crazy was inside and now we know that she is actually pretty rationale (mostly / sometimes / occasionally). Her vocabulary is easily over a 100 words. Also, surprise surprise, she is super opinionated, fairly stubborn and very interested in pushing the rules that she knows are supposed to be inviolate (she stands on the edge of the sidewalk, smiles devilishly at you and touches one toe into the road despite CLEARLY knowing that holding hands is required to go into the road). We always suspected that we were in for trouble, but these past months have demonstrated to us that Elliot, while wonderful in every way, is Trouble with a capital T (that rhymes with E and stands for Elliot).

Summer has really begun in earnest out here in the pacific NW and with beautiful weather comes trips to the zoo (BIRDS! EMUS!!), trips to the playground (SWINGS!!!) and trips to the splash pad (not totally sure about this yet).

Elliot like:

- Trampolines

- Reading in her Teepee

- Talking up a STORM!!

-The zoo

- BUBBLES

Elliot doesn't like:

- Naps

- Wearing clothes that are "too tight"

- When we go somewhere without her doll, Zoe

- When Zoe either does or does not have clothes on (its pretty unpredictable, but sometimes one or the other is the end of the world)

Love to everyone,