Birthday

Birthday boy looking at his cake.


Birthday boy burns himself on hot candle wax.


Birthday boy consoles himself with ice cream cake.




A favorite of Eli from our trip to North Carolina to visit Aunt Mel and Uncle Greg this past week. Boy, do I love that kid. My son is beautiful.



Where did 2 years go? Eli is a fun and funny little guy. He sings more than he talks. He knows most of the words to all the typical preschool songs. He knows numbers up to 15 and can point to and name any number 1 to 10. He counts forwards and backwards, actually. He sits in his crib at night and reads his board books, sometimes for over an hour. When he falls asleep he covers himself with his pillow for a blanket - it's really cute. If he hears so much as the jingle of a car key he heads straight for the front door and gathers up his shoes. He doesn't know where you're going, but he knows he wants to go too. His disposition at two is overall quite endearingly sunny. He can definitely storm when he wants to, but it usually blows over quickly.

Just this week Eli started to say both of his sisters' names. I remember before he was born talking with Charlotte about how old the baby might be when he would learn to say her name. He now loves to point and name all of the members of the family, including himself. Mommy, Daddy, Charlie, Gracie (pronounced sort of like Cee-Cee) and Eli (minus the "l", like Ee-i). We are truly blessed.

Berries

We inherited a nice clump of blackberry bushes in our backyard when we moved in. The girls let me take some pictures of them while they were picking them yesterday.

I really like this one. Web-size doesn't do it justice.


I asked Charlie to tickle Grace and this is what I got :)


They looked at what we shot on the back of the camera, and they felt the berries weren't featured enough. So I climbed up on the swingset to take this one.


Charlotte lost her first tooth a few weeks ago (at Cayden's birthday party actually). I think her gap-toothed smile is cute. She has been waiting for a long time to lose a tooth. She was really excited. I've got a funny tooth fairy story about it, but I'll save that for a later post.


I asked Grace to look closely into my lens. This is what I got. When she was a baby I always thought she had the biggest, roundest eyes. She's still got 'em.


Some snaps of the berry picking. Those bushes are really prickly - you have to be careful where you step.






It is interesting. The berries are in clumps, and the middle ones ripen the fastest. Right now many of them look like this, with one ripe, black berry in the middle.

New pets

A few weeks ago we adopted three baby rats from a local small pet rescue. Charlotte and Grace have begged for a pet for along time. We have talked about everything from a puppy (not going to happen) to a goldfish. We finally all agreed on rats, and I think it was a great choice for us. Their names are Rose, Violet and Petunia. Rose is the white one and she is the calmest and was the quickest to let us handle her. They all have nice little rat personalities, and I think they are getting used to the chaos of three little kids trying to play with them.

I guess you're probably either a rat person or you're not. For all of you out there who like rats...aren't they cute?!

All Three

Derek helped me with this attempted little photoshoot the other morning. Eli was not really in the mood. Charlotte is being a really good sport and singing the baby bumblebee song to try to cheer Eli up. Not working.




We finally got him interested in ring around the rosie.


He doesn't drop down at the end, but he thinks it's really funny when everybody else does.


I know you can't see their faces, but I really like this one. I like the motion in it and how Gracie is reaching out to her little brother.


And we're back to the screaming. End of photoshoot.

Summer haircut

End of May 2010


Middle of June 2009


My last baby. Sigh.

Eli Counting

More baby home movies. Eli was counting little shapes in the bathtub, so for modesty's sake I am just posting the audio. The numbers one through fifteen still constitute about half of his spoken vocabulary, but he's saying more and more things every day. Fun times.

Tonight

The summer evening light is very nice in our bedroom these days. I noticed it a few nights ago and finally managed to go get the camera and take some pictures of Eli after his bath. He is playing peekabo with his pj shirt, which is why his arms are thrown back over his head like that. I just noticed he's also holding a pen, not exactly sure why. He says his name now (just omitting the "l" sound), which he learned from playing this game. He says, "Ee-i? Ee-i? Ee-i?" while he has the shirt over his head and then he emerges triumphantly from underneath. Over and over and over. It just never gets old.

May Flowers

I found this cool field of wildflowers while hiking with the girls and my friends Larry and Cayden and Erin. Derek and I took Eli back one evening to try to get some pictures. I have more to edit. The second is not a great picture of Eli, but it is a nice picture of the field. Since I picked it out to edit during the short window of time that I had available, I guess it shows where my priorities really are.




I know I always talk about how Eli doesn't have many words that he says. He is up to about 5 or 6 words at almost 22 months. So I am sure you can imagine Derek's surprise when he picked Eli up at daycare and his teachers were bursting with excitement to tell about how Eli counted to 12! He did it for us at home, too. You have to use your imagination for the consonant sounds, but all the vowels and syllables are there. Aaah, Oooo, Eeeee, Oooor, Iiiii, Iiiiik, Eeeeden,... We wanted to videotape it but we couldn't find the battery charger for the camera, so you'll all have to take my word for it. My boy's got mad skillz.

I spoke with Alex and she reminded me that Louisa did almost this same thing at the same age. So he's following in great footsteps!