Elliot has learned to be conniving

Here are two examples.

1: Elliot often wants to play MarioKart on B's new Wii, and by "often" I mean "pretty much always, indeed, right now, right now he is wanting, wanting to play MarioKart." I'm sitting here and he's plaintively demanding: "kart? Kaaaaart???" He gazes at Brandon with beseeching eyes. Now Brandon is saying, "No, Elliot, no Kart." Elliot, pausing to consider, wants to emphasize the benevolent nature of his request. "Kaart? DA's turn! DA's turn."

2: If Freud had pondered the question "What do toddlers want?" his essay on the subject would have been very short, because all he would have said was, "When toddlers are down, they want to be up, and when they are up, they want to be down."* Elliot has a new strategy to get up when we want him to be down. I'll be walking along with him in the stroller and he'll start saying "up? up? Uuuup?" and because I am cold-hearted and in a hurry, I won't let him. So what has Elliot concocted as a way to melt my cold cold heart and convince me to get him out of his stroller, and at least part-way on the path to freedom? He stops asking "up?" and starts asking, "hug? Mama? Hug? Mama hug Elliot? Hug?"

He is clever, this one.

In other news, here is a picture of Elliot wandering around in Brandon's boxer shorts, which he pulled out of a (clean) laundry pile and decided to wear around for a bit. Note how both legs are in the same leg hole.






*There might also have to be a section of the essay on how toddlers want goldfish crackers, I don't know.