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Max goes to the Zoo

I had a free afternoon with Max and not Katie recently, and I decided it would be fun to go to the zoo! Max and I drove to Apple Valley to the Minnesota Zoo and had a great time. I took a bunch of videos.

The first video I took, I had to scramble to get the camera ready to record Max's delight in running toward a large bronze statue of a turtle that is just inside one of the large indoor exhibit areas:

Yes, that's right. My son was in such a hurry to run up to the sculpture because he wanted give the turtle a big kiss on the mouth (or on the beak, I guess). Only much later did it occur to him that it might be fun to ride on the turtle's back. I'm sure his priorities will change at some point, but it's rather cute in the meanwhile.

On the day that we went to the zoo, Max had three words in his fledgling vocabulary: ball, bird, and duck. (He also learned "mama" and "dada" and "baby" but having mastered them, they no longer interested him enough to say them.) This was made a little more confusing because his pronunciation of each word consisted mostly of the initial consonant, with just a hint of the vowel sound. Effectively, "ball" and "bird" came out "bah" and the listener was left to reason out through contextual clues which Max meant. Thankfully, Max usually provided very easy-to-follow contextual clues: he would only say one of these words while pointing at the referent object. See if you can pick out what it is that Max sees here:


One problem with a three-word vocabulary is that sometimes you see something that you can't yet describe:


We ended the day in the kids room. Max's favorite thing there was a table with a bunch of metallic bugs that could be moved around by manipulating magnets underneath the tabletop. Max had no interest in controlling the magnets to make the bugs move around. He just wanted to smash the bugs.

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  1. YOU AND MAX ARE SOOOOOOOOOOO CUTE!!!!!! AND SWEET AND HANDSOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOVE MOM AND GRAMMA

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