New tricks...

Just in the past week, Eliana has gotten much better at standing up. Her legs are no longer made of jello, it seems like, and her balance has gotten much better. She is even starting to cruise the furniture - walking along it, holding on. (She still can't crawl though.)

She has also learned how to clap. She practices every once in a while, just for fun.

And she's been practicing her "da-da's" and "ba-ba's" a lot lately.

She still loves playing ball. If you roll the ball to her, she'll even (try to) roll it back to you!

And as you can see, her hair is still wild. Whenever we go out, at least one or two strangers comment on it, without fail.

Passport Photo Bloopers

We're thinking about going on a cruise to Alaska sometime this summer. So we need to get Eliana a passport in case we leave from a port in Canada.

Taking a passport picture of Eliana has been a fun challenge because of the ridiculous rules about passport pictures. There are strict guidelines about the passport picture and they were obviously written by a jaded federal government worker who has never met a baby before. For one thing, the background must be completely white, not showing anything or anyone supporting the child. Sure, Eliana can sit up by herself, but we weren't sure a passport photo store would have a high chair for her to sit on. And then there's the rule that she must be looking straight at the camera, with her mouth closed and eyes wide open. Catching Eliana with her mouth closed proved to be a challenge. For the past 8 months of her life, we've been encouraging her to smile and that proved to be a hard habit to break.

"What is going on?"

"Hi there!!!"

"Wait, I'm about to sneeze..."

"I'm sooooo bored."

"I've got this crazy hangover."

"Ha ha, tricked you."

"Watch me fly!"

"I'm getting angry!"

At this point, we gave up for the night. The federal bureaucrats and their arcane rules won. Two days later we tried again...

"Not this again!"

"Hi there!"

"You're funny!"

"My parents are weird.""How many pictures are you going to take?"
"I'm tired of this..."

And that was the picture we ended up using. While this is not the Eliana we know and love, this picture meets all the criteria. Even though she looks a little depressed in it, there's nothing in the rules saying you can't look depressed for your passport pictures. So after two nights and forty-two pictures laters, we found the one (we hope).

Eight months old....

Here's a video showing some of Eliana's favorite activities. Now that the weather is warming up, hopefully she can go outdoors more. She loves swinging on the porch swing and taking walks outside. She also spends her day rolling around the living room and touching everything within her reach. And she oh-so-bad wants to crawl...

"Normal" baby food...

Last week, Mommy decided to try again giving Eliana "normal" baby food--mushy things. And...voila! Eliana now eats mushy oatmeal and mushy rice cereal like a normal baby.

Mushy foods also means that Eliana gets to smear it all over her hair (and her face, and her clothes).

In our living room, we tried to use foam for insulating pipes to cover the sharp edges of the stone hearth. But this soon became Eliana's favorite toy and she always makes a beeline for it to rip it off and play with it. Now we've given up and it's just one more toy among her collection. It's fun to wiggle it back and forth.

Eliana is quite a good roller now; rolling both to her left and to her right, from back to tummy to back. Here is a video showing off her skills. It's her main (and only) mode of locomotion right now.

A baby gift was a cute pink fleece sweatshirt and a knit cap to go along with it. We tried it on Eliana this past weekend...
And she immediately yanked on it...She needed some help getting it off...

Happy eater...

Eliana has gotten into the groove of eating now. Her diet this past week has consisted of Cheerios, zucchini bread, slices of banana, and other things. Because she is not that good yet picking things up with her index finger and thumb, she usually palms her food. Which means that she does a two-handed shovel of the food into her wide open mouth.

After dinner comes bath time. She still loves her bath time. But because she is a splasher, her bathtub has moved into...well...the bathtub.

For some reason, Eliana always tries to escape the confines of her bathtub.

Her least favorite activity might be getting her clothes put on after the bath. To distract her, we let her suck on her toothbrush, which for some reason is very enjoyable. She likes sucking on either end.

And who doesn't enjoy a good book before going to bed?

She's 7 months old...

Eliana's hair gets longer and longer every week. And it defies gravity or any attempts to comb it flat.

Eliana's Aunt Jenny visited from Denver this weekend. Eliana was so glad to see her!If you look closely, you can see two little tears running down her face. Although Eliana has some stranger anxiety still, she did get used to her Aunt Jenny.

When Eliana was using her sippy cup, she didn't know to tip the cup and so she would end up taking gulps of air. So we got her a sippy cup with a straw. She loves drinking water...

And then there's eating... she loves eating and likes to stuff her face, but remember that she doesn't like mushy food. So she sticks to things that are truly solid with the occasional slice of banana. If you put it in front of her, she'll eat it (sort of like her father.)

Eliana is definitely right handed and will do all of her food grabbing with her right hand. In between mouthfuls of food, though, she'll run her slimy right hand through her hair. So her hair gets a coat of saliva mixed with dissolved Cheerios every night.

And last but not least, here's Eliana making high-pitched bird noises and acting like a wriggly worm just before her usual bedtime around 11pm (no, that's not a typo; we've found that if we put her to bed after 11pm, she'll sleep straight through the whole night, usually till about 7:30).

Seven months now...

We are starting to figure out what solids Eliana will eat. Eliana will not eat rice cereal, or oatmeal, or bananas. Then Emily's mom told us that when Emily was a baby, she did not like mushy foods. So it seems like Eliana has inherited her mother's aversion to mushy things. So we give her Cheerios and animal crackers for her to suck on and eat. And no more mushy foods for Eliana. And she has only recently been able to pick up small objects with her thumb and index finger.Or one can forgo the opposeable thumb thing altogether and pick up a Cheerios cereal between two fingers. To help her become more wordly, we've started Eliana on soccer practice already. She loves it!

She's getting better and better at flipping herself over from her back to her tummy and back again. She'll swing her leg out and use the weight of her leg to leverage herself over. Interestingly, she'll only do this with her right leg, never with her left. She must be right legged.

She's also good at the baby equivalent of push-ups. Between this and rolling over, we've realized that we need to start baby proofing the house as she'll be crawling very soon.

And last but not least, Eliana likes to make a funny face by crinkling up her nose and breathing in and out really loudly.