Family Reunion

During the first week in July David's family had a little reunion. It was nice to have everyone together for the week. Unfortunately we stayed in Texas and it was over 100 every day so we could only really stay indoors and play games or go the the pool. Despite the lack of things to do we had a grand time. We really love playing games anyway. Thanks to Dave's sister for setting it up and using her time share to get us a great place to stay.
Elijah cuddling grandpa after a swim.
Our family.
The shocker game that Lindsay brought. The slowest person to push the button get's a mild shock.
Elijah and his cousin Jamison.

1st birthday

2 and a half months ago our little guy turned 1. It is crazy to think that Elijah has been a part of our lives for more than a year now. We made it easy on ourselves and just had family over. We had homemade pizza (which Elijah LOVES), salad, fruit, and of course cake and ice cream. Elijah had a lot of fun with all the attention on him. He got some lovely gifts and we enjoyed celebrating him.

Us with Elijah and his "build-an-owl" from Aunt Jacque.
Remy and Elijah checking out his new toy from mommy and daddy.Elijah and mommy.
Letting him dig into his first birthday cake.
The back of the awesome cake I made (with Melanie's help).The front view.

The side.

walking

Elijah's been walking at least a few steps a day since Feb 24th. He's getting pretty good now as the video shows. He most often falls when he tries to turn around while standing still or gets distracted but I'd say that as of today about half of his locomotion is walking although he still likes to crawl under things when he can't walk under them.

Movin'

We officially have a crawler. He started crawling consistently on Jan 17th and there has been no stopping him. He was crawling to couches and such and pulling himself up within a week so our life has completely changed. Elijah now crawls very fast. He was starting to cruise along furniture before he started crawling but now he is everywhere. He cruises holding on to walls now as well. every so often if he is distracted he will let go and stand on his own but as soon as he realizes he is doing it he flops one way or another to hold on or to sit down. Elijah's favorite naughty thing to do is to go and play with the blinds by the front door. As I'm typing right now he is holding on to the pullout keyboard platform thingy.

For a while Elijah was giving kisses if you made smooching noises but he doesn't do that as much anymore. We're trying to teach him to clap and give high five and high five is coming along better than clapping.

We don't have any stairs in our house but a few weeks ago at Grandma and Grandpa's house I put Elijah by the stairs to see what would happen and he was going up the stairs withing 5 minutes. It is now one of his favorite things to do there.

Last week we put together a truck that our friends got for Elijah. If you put the seat perpendicular to the truck he can walk behind it and he has gotten the hang of that pretty quickly as well.

He is just growing and progressing by leaps and bounds these days. It is really fun to see. Plus it's nice not to have to carry him from room to room, he just crawls after us with little or no prompting.

Here are a few more recent pictures. (None since he's been walking but I'll try to get those up later this week).

Elijah has been feeding himself Cheerios since he was about 6 months old!
Before he could crawl I stood Elijah up against the wall and he stayed. You can see by the look on his face that he thought he was the bees knees!
We were trying to get ready for church and this was a great way to contain him.
Daddy and Eli, the two headed monster, ready for an evening walk.
Our little rudolph.
Daddy's trains always calm down a cranky boy.
Pink cheeks after a cool evening walk.
Cool dude sitting in an Amish chair.

Crawling

So I've been a little out of sorts lately and not really in the mood to write but I need to do a little journaling so here it goes.

Last night and today Elijah is really starting to work on crawling. He doesn't get onto his knees from his tummy yet and he's only crawled a foot or 2 twice today so we'll see how long it takes him to get proficient.

Elijah loves solid food and I am working on getting him on 3 solid feedings a day. He would eat until he threw up if I let him. He now has 2 teeth and loves to feed himself cheerios so I think I may start working on other finger foods.

Elijah is a very happy baby unless he's sick and unfortunately he has been sick quite frequently lately. He had some throat thing that put him on antibiotics before Thanksgiving. Then he got a nasty cold. When the cold subsided he was a fuss bucket again and we took him in and found a double ear infection. A week after he stopped antibiotics for that I took him in after a sleepless night and he is now on antibiotic 3 for a sinus infection. I am really hoping that this is the end of that for a while.

Other than that life around here is good. We had a nice Christmas (but forgot to bring the camera to the in-laws to take pictures so I'll post pics when I get them) and Dave's grandma came the week after and we enjoyed getting to know her better. We also had a fine New Year and we're looking forward to the summer break (but not the heat).

Just realized that I needed to mention that Elijah has been sitting on his own since the Wednesday after Thanksgiving.