Recently...

Let's see.... the other day I got to pretend to be a mom of two when I babysat for Sam and Catherine's year old boy Tjabe. Catherine was all ready to take Tjabe to the sitter so she could attend a meeting for work when the sitter called and said her own kids had pinkeye. Eek! So Tjabe came and played with us for a few hours, which made Ellie very happy. Here are the cuties:


I don't know if I mentioned it before or not, but when Ellie was younger she had a tendency to suck her thumb. So, we started giving her a pacifier, knowing that you can take a pacifier away at a later time, but you can't take her thumb away. Well, about a month ago Eliana decided that she is no longer interested in a pacifier. She'll play with it, or chew on it, but she doesn't suck on it (or her thumb or anything) for comfort. She weaned herself from the pacifier by 6 months. Woohoo! I figured we'd cross that bridge when we came to it, but now we don't have to. Oh yeah - we also don't have to swaddle her to sleep anymore. We usually still swaddle her for bed at night, but not always and its no longer a necessity.


Ellie LOVES to ride around on Leif's shoulders. She grins and giggles and holds onto his hair and ears. It's cute. Personally, I think Leif likes it just as much as she does.


On the crawling front, we still lack mobility, but Eliana is getting stronger. She's gotten her belly a tiny bit off the ground and her knees under her without dropping her arms a couple times now. She spends a good portion of her day working on moving around. She's also getting better at the "M" sounds and has said "Ma ma" in imitation a few times now. I realize that it's just a sound and it has no meaning to her yet, but it still makes me very happy to hear the sound Mama coming from my baby.

I leave you with this picture, and I want you to know that I put her on the little checkered blanket by the toy. Even without being able to crawl, she gets around when she wants to.