Eli helps decorate the Christmas Tree!

I'm not sure if all of these will work. This is Eli decorating the Christmas tree at Boppy and Grandma Debbie's in Oregon. He was sure he needed to walk up the step ladder to put up each decoration. Unless Uncle Ben or Boppy would lift him up high to put one higher on the tree. We learned right away that bulbs were a bad idea because Elijah loves to throw balls :-). He was so excited though every time he got an ornament on the tree. We tried to catch his little arm pumping :-) The one of him in the puddles I thought was a tree decorating one but since it's on here I might as well leave it :-) I'll try to put up more from the visit soon :-)

This is Elijah's new trick that he just started today. He can push both of the toys he pushes at once. He was pretty excited about it and grabbed me to come and see it.

We Visited The Earth Place!

Our library here has free tickets to places that you can check out, so we decided to go to the Earth Place in Westport. It's a fun little nature place. We went on the 19th of June.

They had a playroom area that had things for different ages. This is about the first time Eli has ever played with a shape sorter and he thought it was pretty fun. He kept handing it back to me to open it and get the pieces out again!

This was a cool toy! It's like those little things with the metal pins that you can make take the shape of your face and hands and things. This one has plastic pegs. Eli was playing with it, but as soon as I came to help him with it the independent little guy wouldn't have anything to do with it anymore. That's Josh's face, and the many hands on the right are my hands. I think the other fingers are Josh's.

Here we are walking on some of the nature "trails." Some of them were real trails while the other places we were just walking under the trees and guessing if we were on a trail or not. Every now and again there were marks or signs. It was pretty fun though. I liked that Elijah got to play under the trees kind of like when I was little and we used to play in the trees below our house.

I know that some of you may be offended by the backpack/leash, but Eli likes his Doggy backpack because now he has a backpack like Mommy's diaper bag and Daddy's school backpack, and he doesn't run off into poisin ivy by mistake.

After a while we put Eli in the stroller (which it turned out we didn't really need) so that we could get him back to play on the playground.

We don't have any pictures on the playground, because we didn't get to stay there long. Everywhere we went there were hornets and whasps following us around. It was a fun looking playground too. Elijah was particularly sad to leave a little basketball hoop, but we didn't have a ball with us anyway.

They have animals too, but I think I was too involved looking at them with Eli. They have a small indoor animal room with ghinea pigs and ferrets and little birds that they have rescued and are healing. They also had snakes and rabbits. The doves started calling while we were there. I love the dove call. Outside they had birds of prey that they had rescued. There were these two really big bald eagles that were particularly fun to see!

Eli's First Birthday!

So, these pictures are out of order due to the fact that I was still learning what order they would appear and I don't want to change the order now that they are uploaded, so please bear with me. I know this post is only what like 3 months late :-) anyway... Above is where Eli and I blew out the candle on our first birthday cake on our first birthday :-). Though, according to my Grandma Saunders, I don't get any older anymore because I'm just going to give all of my birthdays to Eli :-)
Above is the attempt to get all three of us in the picture on the happy day :-). Bellow you will notice that there is a strange whole in the cake. hmm... Well, the three pictures following the whole will explain how that got there.




Eli likes to smile for the camera :-)
Eli is opening his presents, and you guessed, I'm wearing comfy clothes. You are allowed to wear comfy clothes whenever you want on your birthday.


This is Eli's cake. I was going to make a joint cake with one lonely candle on Eli's side and lots and lots of candles on my side, but then I remembered how Eli likes his Bath so much so I made a bath tub shaped cake and the number 1 candle is supposed to be his bath toy :-)

All in all it was a great birthday :-)

Elijah Videos and More!

So, I need to still post Eli's birthday and Christmas, but I thought that you might like to see what he's up to right now as well....

Eli's First Halloween

Okay so I'm little behind. Here are some Pictures from Eli's first Halloween! My sister Nikki had a Tigger costume that Eli's cousin, Tyler, wore on his first Halloween! They were born close enough to the same time of year that it fit Eli!

Sadly, we didn't get to go trick-or-treating. Not that Eli's old enough for that yet, but that day we went to the outlet mall as a family, then Eli and I (Jenna) flew to Oregon for two weeks. In case you wanted to know, on Halloween the "spirits" were free. Obviously, I don't drink, so it didn't matter to me, I just thought that was pretty funny, but the flights weren't full either, which was nice :-). Anyway, here are some more pictures: