Our cruise to Alaska

We came back from our 7-day cruise to Alaska this past Saturday. We left out of Seattle and stopped at 4 towns as we cruised up and down the Inside Passage. The weather was unseasonably sunny and warm, to the point where we were putting on sunblock everyday.

Eliana did reasonably well on the cruise. The first couple of days she was a little overwhelmed with all the people around her. But she eventually got used to it and even started smiling at the waiters in order to get their attention. She slept well some nights, and not-so-well on other nights. If you look closely, you'll see her 6 teeth. And two more are sprouting this week.

More mobile, more vocal...

We'll be needing to set up the baby gates really soon, both at the top and the bottom of the stairs.

She has officially discovered the stairs and thinks it's kind of fun to climb them.
We've been consistenly using baby signs with Eliana. It's basically a few words using sign language and babies often learn them so they can communicate even if they can't sound out the words. One of the signs is for "all done" and we usually use it to ask her if she's done eating at the end of a meal. Now she does it when she wants to be free of her high chair.

And other times, Eliana goes into what can only be described as expository orations. One can only guess at what she's saying, much less what she's thinking. But whatever she is saying, she sure is passionate about it.

And this will be our last post for a little while as on Saturday, we will be leaving for a week-long cruise to Alaska. We are very excited about it. After having her own room for the past few months, Eliana will once again share a room with Mommy and Daddy. That'll be an interesting experience and we'll let you know how that turns out. Here she is doing some planning for next week.

Eliana's little green friend...

Eliana has found a buddy to follow around.  It's green, makes noise, and comes out to play about once a day.  Yes, you've guessed it--it' s the Swiffer vacuum cleaner that we use to keep the floors clean.  (If we don't use it, she ends up finding odd pieces of dirt, leaves, or crumbs, all of which she would put into her mouth.)

So as Mommy uses the vacuum to clean the kitchen floor, Eliana follows in her crab-style crawling.  You'll also notice all her bibs on the floor - - she empties the drawer daily, and we don't always pick them up right away!

Trip to California

This past weekend, we flew to San Jose to visit Ye-ye and Nai-nai (Eliana's grandparents).  She's becoming an expert flyer and as long as we keep stuffing her face during the entire flight, her ears never bother her.

She now likes the peek-a-boo game, as you saw on the last post.  Using a paper plate to cover up her face works just as well...

Boo!

On Saturday, we went out for lunch to a Korean tofu house.  She had her usual fare of 1 stick of string cheese, scrambled eggs, bits of ham, and rice cereal.

The adults had boba tea afterwards.

On Saturday night, we attended our friend Dianne and Chris' wedding reception.  This was Eliana's first wedding!

On Sunday, we had dim sum...

We also took Eliana hat shopping.  Because she has such a big noggin', she's already outgrown the last hat and we needed a new one for our upcoming trip to Alaska (in 1 week!).

She was very tired by the end, but we still stopped at Yogurtland where Daddy got frozen yogurt in four different flavors: strawberry, pistacchio, taro, and coconut.

Eliana has started pointing a lot lately.  She doesn't necessarily point at anything in particular, but instead waves her little forefinger around like a magic wand.  That's when she's not busy trying to pry the keys off of the laptop keyboard.

And the flight back home was uneventful.  We made it home by 9pm and she went straight to bed since this was already past her bedtime.

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!