family members

Over the last few months Elijah discovered that he has more family members than just Mom ("Mama") and Dad ("Dah-dy" or "Papa" depending on the context). Every once in a while we catch him reciting everybody's name to himself out loud. It usually starts with the two of us, and then moves on to "Pahkah" (Grandma) and "Pah-(long pause)-kah" (Grandpa), followed by "Ee-Tee" (Uncle Tim) and "Ah-Oo" (Aunt Chelsea). Then comes "Goggie" (Allie the dog), and the list invariably concludes with "Gee-ka" (Jesus).

old macdonald and his amazing farm

Every once in a while Ryan sings Old MacDonald with Elijah, who has by now figured out what's going on. He gets to choose the animals on the farm, and he invariably chooses "Goggie!" the first time. And the second time. And the third time. And so on. After a while, Ryan protests. After all, Old MacDonald has got to have more animals on the farm than just dogs. Elijah still can't say the names of most animals, so he designates them by the sounds they make. Turns out, Old MacDonald has quite an eclectic farm. Besides having a sheep (requested by "baaa"), he has a Russian goose ("ga-ga-ga"), a lion ("arrrrr"), and... a light ("tla"). Unfortunately, we are not quite sure what sound lights make, so the song usually stops at this point.

"professional" photos

We had to wait a few weeks for Elijah's cut to heal up a little bit. In the meantime, we decided not to go to a professional photographer after all. I personally don't like the fact that I have to buy paper copies of the pictures and then be forever limited by what I bought. Plus, the places I am willing to afford don't always produce amazing pictures, and the ones that do charge way too much. Thus, we grabbed a white sheet and set to work. Out of a couple dozen photos we took, only a small number turned out decently, but it's pretty good for our first time. If nothing else, we had a blast doing this, and the price was right. :)

P.S. For those interested in getting prints of these pictures, I posted the original high resolution photos on Picasa Web. Feel free to either download them to your computer or order straight from the website (look for a button saying "Order Prints").