Eli Takes a Stand

Eli has been doing a pretty good job of scooting around the house while holding onto things, but every now and then he gets so distracted by something he picked up off the coffee table that he doesn't always realize that he is standing without any support. Today I was able to trick Eli into standing on his own and was surprised to see how long he actually did it for! I called Kelvey over to video tape it as I tried to get him to do it again:

Hopefully he will be walking by the next post, but for now I am happy enough to see his new parlor trick.

Fun in the Sun

Let me start by saying this: Last year's summer SUCKED. We sweated and cursed our way through a drought filled summer and a total of 68 days of 100+ degree weather. The sweltering heat made for a very uncomfortable summer with little opportunity to go outside, especially with a newborn Eli. Thankfully El Nino has provided us an amazing start to this year's summer (keep in mind this is Texas and our Summers start earlier than the rest of you) and the weather has been breezy and beautiful! This makes for very happy days with our own little nino.

We had a good start to the summer a few weeks ago when we took a trip to Pease Park to join the annual celebration of Eyeore's Birthday, a tradition that started in the 70's when a few hippies decided to skip class and play in the park. FYI, the party hasn't changed much in that a good 75% of the party population is made up of hippies or people engaging in typical hippie activities (if you know what I mean *nudge*nudge*). Anyways, it was a rather lovely day of enjoying the outdoors, people watching, and dancing to pulsing beats of the drum circle:

Last weekend was even better. We woke up, poked our heads outside and said to each other, "It's a perfect day for trip to the ol' watering hole". So we got Eli into his Lil' Swimmer swimming diapers and headed to the neighborhood pool. Eli hasn't been swimming since Aug. 2009 so we figured we may have to carefully reintroduce him to the water again so he didn't freak out and ruin our chances of coming back to the pool again. We slowly dipped his toes in and lowered him in little by little until he was up to his chest in water. It helped that Eli was mesmerized by all the other kids splashing around at the pool. Eli was most comfortable lounging on me like a floaty or bobbing around in Kelvey's arms, but he really loved being pulled through the water while we made motorboat sounds. When it got a little toasty in the sun, we moved to our shady spot under a tree and let Eli explore a little. When we got home we were a little scared that Eli got sunburned, but it turned out he was just a little flushed from the heat, a trait he gets from his mom. Hopefully he won't end up looking like George Hamilton by the end of summer.