My wolf-pup

My little (big, actually) Eli has been tagged. Since Stacy thinks Eli's a bit of a psychological case, I thought I'd add a bit more details of his strange personality for the rest of you. So, I'm not going to gush, I'm going to be real. Don't get me wrong: I love Eli, but he's one difficult, challenging child and sometimes I wish it would be oh so much easier. But, then I probably wouldn't have the need to blog nearly nightly, so I guess I should be happy no matter where I am.

1. Eli is an animal lover, a freak, really. Above is his hand, feeding the animals at the Beus Duck Pond. When we learned we were moving to Utah, one of his first questions was how far it would be from the Milwaukee Zoo. We were thrilled to find the Hogle Zoo online, and convinced Eli that the Mandrill was waiting for him. Sure enough, when we went to the Zoo here for the first time (withing a week of being unpacked, mind you), Eli ran up to the mandrill's cage yelling, "I'm here!". We build zoos or different areas of the earth out of blocks and animals just about daily. His most recent favorite book is "Gone Forever: A book of extinct animals", meaning he knows more about extinct animals than I think most any four year old would care to know.
2. Eli has a very active, unique imagination. He thinks he is a wolf-pup and that his tent on top of his bed is a den. He's often overhead singing songs based roughly on the day's episode of Curious George with a bit of Diego ("let's go save the animal in trouble!") and Dora ("Where do we need to go?" and then listing three places) thrown in for good measure. Before our recent trip to Wisconsin, he would bark in the morning when he woke up.

3. Eli hates having his picture taken, except that sometimes he likes to see what it looks like on the back of my camera. He enjoys using my old camera to take pictures, though. He's a lot like his late grandpa, Mel, who would never pose for pictures unless forced by the church (for the directory).

4. Eli has a love-hate relationship with his brother, Braedy. Sometimes, he's extremely generous with his toys, but unfortunately, his four year old brain doesn't know how to gently suggest to Braedy that it's time to stop sharing, and instead, he just starts to pick him up, scream in his face or do some other inappropriate act. He loves to play chase with Braedy. He also has started to parrot whatever unkind things I say about Braedy, like "here comes trouble" and has just recently become a bit of a tattletale, lettting me know just what Braedy's gotten into, and when. Of course, given the state of our basement and upcoming renovations, letting me know Braedy's gotten into nails is probably not such a bad thing.
5. Eli has a very unique, personal sense of style. After trying to battle it, I have finally given into his wishes. I figure it really doesn't hurt anyone. He only wears shirts with animals on them, and insists upon wearing "whale pants" (camouflage pajama bottoms) while we're at home. Sometimes, we allow him to wear them outside as a bribe to get him to go on a walk.

The whale pants came about as a result of his grandma giving him a set of Carters' shark pajamas. He first wore them September 11, 2006 and, after a 45 minute battle to get him out of them the next morning, I started buying them up in droves (mostly so I wouldn't have to do laundry daily). I think he had 8 sets. Nightly, he would look in his drawers to see whether he had a clean shark shirt for the next morning, and believe you me, if by some sick twist of fate we did not have a clean shark shirt, I heard about it for literally all morning. Literally. Now, the shark shirts are in the form of a quilt my mom made, and Eli can still fit into the elastic waist "whale pants", though even the longest of original pairs is about 5 inches off of his ankles.
6. Eli loves Brian.

LOVES, loves, loves. He wants to do whatever Brian does, but is also quite adept at telling him what he doesn't like (as an example, "Dad, you watch too much TV" during the Packer football games). He's been "helping" in the basement, but last weekend that meant creating a maze of wood and putting nails all over the ground. He starts asking when Brian will be home at around 3:00 p.m. daily and always wants to know how far away Saturday is.

So, there's a snippet of the life of my wolf-pup for your reading pleasure. I'd like to know more about Carson S., Keegan Z. and Cameron C. (since he likes to hang out here!).