Eli keeps telling me that he's a 'big boy' these days. He's always claiming to be bigger than his friends at daycare (even though he clearly isn't - most of them are at least a couple of centimetres taller!), which means that I'm constantly reminding him that 'it's not about being bigger, it's about being better'. Whilst I'm not sure that my advice is necessarily good in terms of tempering his competitive nature, he's at least buying into the idea that being big isn't the be all and end all of his (and everyone elses) existence.
Despite not being a giant, he certainly is trimming down and muscling up these days, and he knows it. So when I casually suggested on the weekend that we might go to Lone Pine and see if he can hold a koala (his favourite animal) he was very excited, not to mention 100% optimistic of being up to the task. So off we went to the zoo...
After grumbling in the very slow moving line for a little while, Eli's moment of truth arrived. It turns out that he was big enough, but the handler put him up on a seat just to make sure that he was high enough (koalas don't like being held too close to the ground) and strong enough (the koala sat on his lap). Here are some photos of Eli holding Jaffa, or should I say Jaffa holding Eli? I'm not sure which of them was holding on tightest.
It turns out that Eli was certainly better than some of the other people (adults and kids) that were holding koalas, because he sat perfectly still and listened to everything that the handler told him to do. (I'm sure that it helped that he'd also been well drilled by his ex-koala handler Dad too!).
He was very happy with the experience and he also enjoyed patting a snake, a kangaroo and a dingo too!
To finish off the post, here's a photo I took of the professional photo that is now on our fridge door...
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