Eight Months of Eliana

Eight months old, 1/5! Little banana face. (No, really- there's banana on her face.)


Figuring out her sippy cup.


At our annual 7pm countdown New Years Party with the mom's group. It was held at Stacy's this year, a break from tradition because our normal host, Kim, was having her second daughter Julie! Welcome to the crew, Julie! Gwennie's a big sister, but we missed her for the picture. Some would argue that all of our kids missed the picture, but hey, it's a record.


Enjoying the jumperoo. Everybody jump now!


Eliana's getting ready to move, which means mostly that she scoots around on her bunners (that's the official term at our house) and gets herself tangled up in her toys. She hangs out for, oh, about 30 seconds on her tummy before getting cranky about it, so crawling may take a while. Meanwhile, she pulls herself to her knees on the toy basket and otherwise freaks me out. She cut a tooth (did I tell you?) and seems to gnaw on everything, so we are expecting the arrival of more. She is delightful. She really prefers being with me, will cry if she sees me walk by if she's in anyone else's arms, or even playing on the ground. But from my arms, she is babbling, giggling, playful, engaging sweet delight. What fun it is to get her up from a nap, she rewards you with the most adoring expressions and noises. She's starting to grab at everything, which doesn't delight Adessa, who thinks she's trying to take her toys away or pull her hair. Is this the beginning of them being at odds? I hope not with all my heart, I aspire for them to be best of friends and peaceful playmates. (Well, I can hope, right?)


Adessa, while still dependent on her binky for comfort and to sleep, while still preferring to do most of her #2s in her diaper at nap-time, while still sometimes throwing terrific fits when she's tired or hungry or just plain ornery, said this to me yesterday on a walk: "When Eliana gets bigger, like my age, she will stomp in puddles in her raincoat." I was pretty impressed. I am her mom and everything, so I'm supposed to look for signs of spectacularity in my children, and I think that was a pretty spectacular sentence for my girlie. Another one she does, she'll cry holding my legs, looking up at me for comfort and say: "I just want to be held." For some reason, her using the past tense of "hold" at 2 1/2 just makes me laugh. 8) She also has started drawing faces, recognizable smiley faces. I'm not sure when kids do that developmentally, but I'm sure she's waaaaay ahead. Right? Hopefully she won't be like me, though, I always took to things quickly and then was kind of bewildered when everyone else caught up and then passed me.

So Much Fun... (but not too much!)

Possibly too many pictures, though.

We essentially had two Christmases, because Calvin had to work on Christmas Day. Christmas Eve was with his parents and sister and her family, and Christmas Day was with my family. The girls did great with all the hullaballo. I had to take down the Christmas tree the day after Christmas to fit the new toys into our small house. ( Which lead to fits of internal dialogue for me about materialism and teaching the girls about giving and how Christmas isn't about shopping, and about the tremendous amounts of junk you can get for pretty cheap these days, and how at the same time that I wanted to teach them valuable lessons, I also wanted there to be a lot of fun stuff for them to open. I'll be mulling all that over)

But, yes, our Christmas: I'll let the photos tell the story...

The weekend before Christmas, we feasted at Mt. Hermon's Christmas Banquet/Concert series with Grandma and Grandpa Lewis and Auntie Evie and Uncle Randy and the cousins. Adessa LOVES her cousins. Thank you, cousins, for being so attentive to my girls.



This shot is pre-banquet. These pictures kinda make me wish I'd waited until after the banquet to do the Christmas cards.


Monday, 12/21 my merry mom's group decorated gingerbread houses.


All this fun done near tuckered 'em out!


Eliana and our tree, on Christmas Eve eve. I love pictures with the tree, they are instantly interesting and magical. I think this means I should get more houseplants.


Christmas Eve morning, we opened our little family's presents. Say cheese!


Hey, this is fun!


Opening presents with the Lewis Clan after our delicious Christmas Eve feast and revelry.


Opening presents with the Beck clan, Christmas morning. What Calvin missed was...

Adessa's first and favorite present. After opening a trunk full of dress-up gowns and accessories, Adessa was interested only in prancing and curtseying and sashaying around. She had to be talked into opening her other wonderful gifts. And now, post Christmas, she has to be talked out of wearing only princess gowns in the cold, in the rain, to the grocery store, etc.


Pausing to rest for a moment after the present-opening frenzy.


Ben and I with the gorgeous sign that he made for our family. This thing is beautiful and will feature prominently in our house.


Adessa snuggled with Auntie Lolo before our Christmas dinner at church, which was the end of the Christmas fun. Also which, lucky for you, I didn't get any pictures of. 8) Happy Holidays!

Jingle Bells

We tried to get a fall picture with our tree, based soley on my determination to have a seasonal picture every year with the fall colors and our little tree. We waited too long, I think, and when all were awake and semi-cheerful, it was too bright. But we got a picture! Good thing, too, that afternoon it rained and the tree lost all its leaves.


This is Adessa playing with her cousins at Aunt Deborah's a few days after Thanksgiving. What fun to watch her be a part of the kid action, albeit a little behind the older kids.


I was so excited for Thanksgiving to be over so I could get the Christmas decorations up. I think the girls aren't sharing my enthusiasm in this pic. Thanks for the great stockings, Mom!



Going on a weekday, we had the whole Christmas Tree Farm to ourselves. Which meant we had to use our self-timer to get this shot. I then posed the girls to best display their cute Christmas clothes, with Adessa holding up a standing Eliana by the armpits. They were adorable, laughing and happy, but the self-timer was still on. So the seconds ticked by, and I didn't want to rescue the teetering Eliana in case the picture was going to take at the last moment. Well...


...she fell, face first, thud, into the mud. We didn't get the picture, and her cute clothes, head, and hands got muddy. Poor babe.


Here she is happy, though, at Grandma and Grandpa Lewis's, getting some support from Carson while she plays.


Adessa shows off the BEAR sausage she's sampling. A student brought it to our class Thanksgiving feast. Adessa made no mention of it tasting like chicken.


Hello!? I just love this one.


Adessa and her first celebrity crush. She tells almost everyone she meets (who have no idea what she's talking about) what Lightning McQueen says: "Ketchow". *A note about her eyebrow: she tripped on her towel after a bath into an open dresser drawer. Luckily Grandma Edna brought her nurse's bag over and put on a butterfly bandaid.