Truck

Good news - I've got videos posted at the bottom! The first is of Elena playing at 3 months. The second is of her "talking" at 4 months.



Elena has been having loads of fun these past few weeks. We took a trip up to St. Paul to stay Rachana, Kelly and Jean (college friends of mine). While there, she got caught in the rain on a walk with Kelly (who luckily had a newspaper handy) and she made a new friend - Jerome, who just moved to MN from Italy with his parents. They seemed to hit it off nicely.





Then we spent the weekend at a cabin near Willmar with Seth's family. Elena played with her 9 cousins, and Mommy threw Daddy off the jet-ski (twice)!



Lastly, we decided that if we're going to live out in the sticks, we'd better buy an old pick-up truck with flames on the front to make it official. Plus, it would have been a little tricky hauling around lumber and appliances in our little Toyotas. Seth is pretty excited to have his very first truck!

P.S. To any of you who wanted to make a comment on a previous post and couldn't, I have now changed the settings so you can.

Funny Face

We were hoping to post some videos of Elena for all to enjoy; unfortunately, I'm not very technologically saavy. I haven't quite figured out how to upload videos onto the site. I promise to keep trying, though. (If any of you have some advice, feel free to share.) In order to make it up to everyone, I asked Elena to make a bunch of faces for the camera while I took pictures, and she obliged. She's a bit of a ham actually :) Now all you have to do is look through the pictures really fast and pretend you're watching a silent video of her.

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Elena is now sitting up very well in her Bumbo (thank you, Mandy!) Mom says she reminds her of Little Miss Muffet - sitting on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey (spit-up).
 

Elena's hobbies currently include trying very hard to roll over onto her tummy and shoving things into her mouth. Her hand coordination is getting better, although she'll still hit herself in the face occasionally if we give her a rattle. She also loves smiling at people - especially her Daddy. We've got quite the social butterfly. Once in awhile she'll even smile back at people when she's upset, which looks really funny because she continues crying with this big smile on her face.

That's all for now. God bless!

The House

I thought I should keep everyone updated on the progress of our house since that seems to be changing even more rapidly than Elena. We (and by "we" I mean Seth, my parents and his family) are currently insulating and sheetrocking the 4+ rooms that we gutted. Now each time I stop by, it looks less like a very dirty jail and more like a very dirty house. We hope to be moved in by the end of September. In the meantime, my parents are enjoying unlimited access to their grand-daughter while we stay with them. I've included a couple of "before" pictures. One is the bathroom - although it was tempting to keep the shower made entirely of PVC pipe and the boarded up window, we've decided to gut it and start over from scratch. There's also a shot of the incredibly steep staircase that Seth tore out and reframed, our bedroom, and my personal favorite: the living room.

Our gorgeous bathroom

Our former staircase

The bedrooms upstairs

Our multi-functional living room/wood shop

I've never been a big fan of blogs, until some friends of ours set up a blog about their new baby, Jerome. Suddenly I found myself frequently checking out their blog to see updates on their cute little bundle of joy. And now that we have a little one ourselves, who (if I may say so myself) is also quite cute, I thought maybe our friends and family would be interested in checking in on her progress from time to time. And so, we have succumbed to societal pressure and started our very own blog. I'm afraid my writing may not be incredibly entertaining, but I hope the pictures and videos at least will be enough to keep you happy. Enjoy!



Elena impersonating Princess Leia.