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!

Eli Talking

Hi! Long time no post. Thanks for still checking in. We're still here. Really.

I finally uploaded some of the video of the kids and resized it to post on-line. Here is Eli saying just about every word he knows. Note: although we prompt him several times to say Mama, he's never actually said it. Yet.



The little hand gestures that he does are from the song Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee. He does this all the time. I'll look over and he'll be sitting there singing to himself going through all the motions. I finally asked his day care teacher what the song was. Before we didn't know, but we would make him laugh alot by imitating him.

More video to come, now that I have gotten the software working and everything.

Easter

I'll be honest, coloring Easter eggs once a year is about as crafty as I get. We had fun. The weather is supposed to be warm and beautiful this weekend, so we will probably hide these outside on Sunday.

Just a few snaps.




This was our attempt at a group shot. Eli was not having any of it. He didn't mind having his picture taken, but he was ticked about having his sisters in there with him.

He's getting so big

Eli still loves to let me photograph him. He eats up the attention. The girls had on new spring dresses the other day, so I put Eli into a little button down shirt and thought we could take some Easter(ish) pictures. Turns out the boy doesn't care to share the spotlight. He refused to sit next to Grace and Charlie and kept trying to drag his favorite little posing stool back onto the center of the backdrop. I'll post those soon. They're funny if nothing else.

Here is Eli a few days ago.

Oh wait

You wanted to actually see the family shot? I meant to save that last post as a draft but I guess I published it instead. So here's the first of our 5 family portraits that I was describing. I would love to do some more candid action shots in the series, but it is tough using the self timer. We'll see what we can come up with.



Eli is 20 months old. He still doesn't have a single reliable, recognizable word (in English). He does a lot of interesting sounding babbling, though. He seems to think he is speaking and he definitely knows what he wants to say. I can't wait until he lets the rest of us in on his secrets. He has a board book that he loves. It is a Baby Bop (from Barney) counting book. When you get to the end he flips back to page 1 so you can start all over again. When I close my eyes I can clearly see a little 2.5 foot person chasing after me waving this book in his hand.

Gracie makes me laugh all the because she can use all kinds of big words in everyday conversation, but she still has a very lisp-y, slurred way of making her letter sounds. She's in speech therapy twice a week and I am guessing it will continue when she gets to Kindergarten. She was telling me all about something we couldn't find and how maybe it was camouflaged, only she says it like camoufwaged. There are lots of other funny examples, but that's the first one I thought of.

I really wanted Charlotte to wear jeans for the shoot above. You can see who won out. She knows what she wants to wear and it is usually not worth the argument to try to change her mind. She had an outfit of her own design on the other day that consisted of a shirt, skirt and pants all in conflicting shades of pink and patterns. I told her she would have to change before going to her friend's birthday party. I showed her some ideas of what would be acceptable combinations. She said with pouty reluctance, "but that's not as beautiful to me."