Elsa speaking skills really shot up over the summer. By mid July she was saying a couple of dozen words clearly. By the end of August she was stringing several words together, forming incomplete – but coherent – sentences. These days she repeats nearly everything she hears – so DEFINITELY be careful what you say around her.

Elsa is also a huge fan (HUGE) of “big trucks”, or anything bigger than a personal sized vehicle that moves. Lucky for her we moved to an area of town that is directly underneath several of the flight paths for the airport. When we are driving around town, to and from daycare (or the farmers market, the only other place we go) Elsa’s eyes are peeled on the roads and she always lets us know what she sees: “Tractor!” “Bus!” ” ‘copter!” ” ‘cycle!”.

While on vacation at the Codroy Valley this summer Dad brought his tractor out of the barn on the day we were leaving to go home. He’d asked me when we first got there if he could take it out to give the girls a ride but all I could picture were Elsa’s not-quite-2-year-old bones and their still soft and malleable joints/tendons/ligaments/whatever taking a possibly life-altering and permanent beating while bouncing around in the tractor trailer. So I said no.

But on the morning when we were about to leave the girls did get to sit on Poppy’s tractor and pretend to drive it. Both of them loved it but Elsa was in her glee.

And since we’ve gotten home – more than a month ago – Elsa wants to read a farm machinery book we have almost every night. And you can’t get through it fast enough to get to the page with the tractors where she bounces up and down with the biggest grin on her face while pointing and hitting the book shouting over and over again “Poppy’s tractor! Poppy’s tractor! Loud! Poppy’s tractor loud!”

Poppy's Tractor

I won’t be surprised if this is the first thing she asks for when we go out there next year. And there’s no way I’ll be able to stop her (or dad) from going for a ride on it.