Saturday BBQ

We started a fun holiday weekend with dinner with friends from church on Saturday. Elijah had a great time playing with Aiden and Portia. Patrick and I really enjoyed spending time with friends and some good grown-up conversation. The guys grilled lamb and dinner was really yummy!

The dads, grilling

Some recent pictures

Here are a few fun pictures we've taken recently:

If he's stuck in his chair he can't run out of the picture! HA!

Sleepy?

And, by special request, just for Kristi:

Belly: 35 weeks

Welcome, little one!

We're aunts again! Hooray! My brother John and his wife Linde welcomed daughter #2, Natalie Beth ("Tallie") into the family last night. We are thankful that all is well with mom and baby and so excited for their new little love. You can check out pictures of her first day on their blog. Hopefully we will get to meet Tallie soon.

Colors

Here is another little video of Elijah - he's really got his colors down now!

Updates

I know we've been slow about posting lately - sorry! I just haven't been taking many pictures lately. Elijah gets all excited and just wants to see what I'm doing when I get the camera out, so I'm taking pictures of an empty frame most of the time.

Last Saturday, my cousin Jackie and her family came out to spend the day with us. The day turned out to be nicer than expected and we had a great time. It was so good to see them! It's been a long time since Jackie and I got to see each other - how exciting to be only a couple of hours' drive away now! Unfortunately, I forgot our camera, but you can see some pictures of our day on Jackie's blog. The only ones I have are of bath time with Elijah and Lily - aren't they cute?

Cousins in the bath

Jackie also posted some pictures of the beautiful sweater and hat that she made for our baby girl - I love them!

Elijah is doing well. He was on a bad trend of getting up extra early and then taking a shorter nap (no good for anyone!) and generally having a hard time because he was always tired. He finally seems to be getting as much sleep as he needs most days (except Sunday, of course) and that helps a lot with his frustration level and we have had a lot fewer tantrums when he sleeps well. He is building all the time and still reading a lot, although he seems to need to move around more while we're reading - sometimes he's just crawling/walking/climbing around near me, but he also has been doing a lot of climbing on me, which is not so fun with a huge belly. Poor little sister is already taking her lumps! Elijah has picked up his colors really quickly in the past couple of weeks and now gets them right almost all the time (brown is still hard). He's also developed the interesting habit of saying, "OK!" both in the right context and when he really doesn't want to do something. It's funny to me that he uses the same word for such opposite meanings!

Here is a random collection of video clips that didn't really go with anything else, but are still funny:

Counting

I've been trying to capture the amazing cuteness of Elijah counting on video, and though I've made many attempts, I never did catch him at the right moment - he does count from 1 to 10 on his own, without prompting, but you'll just have to take my word for that. (To be fair, the camera is pretty distracting.) Besides, if I wasn't counting with him, you all would lose your Elijah-to-English translator and I would have to figure out a way to add subtitles. So here are some of our better tries - enjoy the silliness! (Yes, he does love the numbers 8, 18, and 80 and will throw them in whenever he feels like it.)

C is for cookie

I had a little flashback today - Elijah was asking me to write words for him and asked for "cookie." The "C is for Cookie" song that was on our Sesame Street Sings! record when I was a kid popped into my head and I sang it (as well as I could remember) for Elijah. He thought it was great, so we went looking ... and here is what we found, for all of you who remember this too:

Salad for two

Today at lunch I fell back on one of my favorite ploys to get Elijah to come and eat cheerfully and willingly - salad! Well, I call it salad because he likes to think he's having what I'm having, and I suppose his little fresh veggie mix still qualifies as a salad despite the lack of lettuce...

Anyway, we have come up with a great little system to help me get enough veggies during the day and to make Elijah's lunch time veggies easier as well - Patrick chops all the veggies on grocery day (because he is good and fast at chopping) and we throw them in the fridge in containers for easy assembly. (We also like to get little tomatoes - grape or cherry size - so that they don't have to be chopped at all.) Then I can make myself a salad anytime, even if Elijah is awake. I can also quickly throw together some celery, carrots, and halved tomatoes for a little salad for Elijah to munch on while I get the rest of his lunch together. He loves tomatoes, so an offer of seconds is also a good bribe to get him to eat other things. (Frozen peas or mixed veggies also work pretty well for this - they defrost in a couple of seconds and then keep him occupied while I do other things.) How funny to have a toddler who loves salad!