Another week...

Eliana had sort of a tough week as she caught a cold and three new teeth are coming in. To complement the two bottom teeth already in, she's getting the opposing two tops ones, plus one more on the bottom, to the right of the two already there.

So she's been pretty clingy and prefers to sleep in Mommy's arms. Here's a video that shows her nose is congested, which makes her breathing sound like Darth Vader's.

So we have official documentation of Eliana's first words. She's said them often enough that we know it's not a coincidence. We have a bird feeder outside of the kitchen window. From her high chair, she can watch the birds come and go and now says "bird". And at the end of the video, she makes bird-like noises but she's been doing that all her life.

Eliana also says "book", "bye" (after someone hangs up on the phone), and "boo" (as in peek-a-boo). She doesn't say it here, but knows how to play the game.

She's also getting more clever with little things. She has just now figured out how to scoop water out of the bathtub.

And her love affair with the neighbor's cat continues.

And the cat seems fond, or at least very tolerant, of Eliana too.

Exciting weekend...

Happy Mother's Day!  Elvin took Thursday and Friday off so that we could do some special activities.

One fun thing that we did was to take Eliana to the pool for the very first time.  A short 5 minute drive from our house is a new community center with a large indoor pool designed for kids and families.  Although at first hesitant, Eliana warmed up to the idea of being in the water--it wasn't that different from her bath, she realized.  

It was fun to play with the water fountain bubbling up from the floor of the pool.

And walking around with Mommy and visiting the water spouts was fun too.

It was also extremely exciting to play with all the Tupperware in the cabinets.  There are so many pieces of plastic to bang together and suck on.  Here she is with her defiant facial expression.

After having gone through all the Tupperware in the first level, she stood up to tackle the second shelf.  

We drove 2 hours to an Oregon state park called Silver Falls.  It is famous for its many waterfalls and so we went on a couple mile hike to see them.

Lazy weekend...

This weekend, one of Eliana's cousins, Erica, graduated from college and so we joined festivities around that. Otherwise, we had a low-key weekend. We mostly hung out at home. Eliana's crawling continues to improve and she can get places pretty quickly now. Here she is crawling on the kitchen floor. The squeaky noises she makes means that she's happy. (The noises have recently been mistaken by our neighbor as a bird and by other passerbyers as a squeaky toy.)

We've invented a new game with the Ikea changing pad. It now doubles as a sled that Eliana can ride on and she seems to like it! After the sledding fun was done, we kept the camera rolling so you could witness some of Eliana's typical vocabulary...

Our neighbor has two cats. One of them has taken a liking to Elvin (NOT a cat lover) and ambushes him whenever he is working on the yard. This cat also likes Eliana, or at the very least, doesn't mind her piercing squeaks and rough pats. Eliana, for her part, goes absolutely crazy when she sees the cat (although she is easily distracted by grass and other things within reach)...

And we were noticing how much she has grown when looking at pictures of her in her high chair. Ten weeks ago, her chin was level with the high chair tray. Today, she's much bigger.

This picture was taken in mid-February.
We took this picture today. Look at her hair!

Hanging out...

This weekend we went hiking in the Columiba River Gorge. It was a short drive from Portland to a place called Latourell Falls. and although it rained a little bit, the weather mostly cooperated. We tried out the baby backpack, and Ellie seemed to like it fine! We hiked for about 2.5 miles. Here we are taking a quick break at the upper falls.

And here are the lower falls.

Eliana mostly seems to have a good appetite. At the same time, she seems to get bored of certain foods. Peanut butter sandwiches, which used to be a big hit, don't seem to appeal to her anymore. The current favorite food is scrambled eggs.

And hanging out consists of letting Eliana roam around the (what we hope is) child-proof family room. Since she has gotten so good at cruising around the furniture, that's what she mostly likes doing. Here she is around the coffee table.

And one last thing that is very fun for her is to give us her toys. She'll offer it even if we don't ask for it. Usually, after we take it, she claps for herself (in this case, because she has to hold on to Mommy's hand, she slaps her leg) with a big smile.

Crawling!

Well...sort of. As you'll see, Eliana can make foward progress. But her leg movements are by no means swift and clean. Her right leg, especially, seems to get in the way--instead of bending it at the knee, she likes keeping it straight, which makes the whole crawling thing awkward.

Thank goodness we've bolted the sofa table to the wall. Eliana likes to pull herself up and will grab onto any furniture that's within arm's reach. Once she gets up, you will notice she likes to shake the furniture. This table isn't very shaky, so she is just shaking herself. It works better with other stuff - she loves to make the lamp rattle on one of the end tables.

Eliana had her 9 month check up this past week. She weighed in at 19 pounds and 14 ounces. As you can see from the picture below, the fat comes in rolls around her legs. The astounding thing was her head circumference. At 18 inches around, Eliana rocketed to the 91% mark! She's got a big noggin.

And spring is finally here for good. It was in the 70's and 80's this past weekend and it looks like we're going to have a couple more days of cloud-less skies in store.

Now that the weather is really nice, Mommy took Eliana out to the neighborhood park which is only a 3 minute walk away. Eliana went on the swing all by herself for the very first time. As expected, she loved it.

Happy Easter!

For Easter, Eliana wore a dress (!)and got a basket of eggs. They were fancy "Underwater Sea Adventure" eggs, to be specific, and came in the shapes of sea creatures. Daddy figured they would be fun bath toys. She also got a box of animal crackers.

You can also see that Mommy's basket came with Peeps and cotton candy. Daddy's basket came with Snicker's and Kettle Chips.

Before leaving for church, Eliana spent her time chasing after eggs. She can move foward by creative use of her arms and right leg, but this isn't what most people think of when they say "crawling." Watch...

Just in the past week, she has also been able to pull herself up to a standing position.

Trip to California...

This past weekend, we again made our pilgrimage to San Jose, CA to visit Elvin's parents. We left on Friday evening, so Eliana had dinner at the airport. She doesn't like airplane food, so we fed her the mushy stuff in the terminal.
She did very well on the flight. We kept giving her snacks to munch on and water to drink to keep her ears from bothering her. We watched the sunset together.The next day, we went out for dim sum. While Daddy dined on chicken feet, Eliana ate oyster crackers and a peanut butter sandwich.

Later on Saturday afternoon, we went out for a short hike. Elvin expertly guided the group to a dead end, so we had to turn around. Eliana let other people hold her for a long time. She helped carry the water bottle.
She wore her sun hat and didn't even try to tear it off.

One of Eliana's favoriate games with people is "high five." It's so fun to "high five" Ye-Ye [grandpa]!

On Sunday morning, we went out to brunch at Hobees with a friend. This Cupertino, CA establishment is famous for it's large servings of deliciously fluffy coffeecake. Someone was busy wolfing the stuff down like it was their last meal.

Apparently, food coma kicked in. For the past several weeks, nap time has been on her tummy. Even if you turn her over to her back, she'll flip to her tummy again.On the flight back, she enjoyed a bag of pretzels.

And finally zonked out after a very full weekend.