A new point of view...

Not long after he started crawling, Elliot decided to do some more exploring of the world around him.  In fact,  you could say he reached a higher plane...

And now the whole world is a game of trying to see what he can see...and there is quite a bit to see even in our little apartment.

When in doubt, suck on your fingers.

It's been really interesting to see Elliot's personality develop.  One thing in which he very much differs from his big sister is his independence.  Kendra has always been fiercely independent...but always in the same room as me.  Always.  Before she was mobile, she'd cry if I left the room.  Elliot, however, is content to explore all on his own--I have to keep careful track of him because he also has an uncanny ability to enter a room and pick up the one object that he can ingest to bring certain death.

He often makes his way into the room he shares with Kendra and busies himself playing with whatever he finds there.  When I check on him, I see this pretty often:

But I wasn't satisfied with that shot, so I started blowing raspberries at him to make him smile.

That got his attention pretty well.

But to my surprise, he didn't smile at me...

...he started blowing raspberries right back.

Funny guy.

Kendra at play

I've commented before that Kendra makes two types of messes.  The first type is the mess she makes as she rummages through her toys, sometimes just to see what is there but often in search of a specific object (and her recall is uncanny).  The second type of mess she makes are the little piles of collections she leaves all over the house.  This is an example of the second type of mess that was out in the middle of the afternoon after she busied herself with another activity.

And this is a very, very deliberate mess here, for those of you who think it's just a few piles of toys.

The pile on far right is one we've mentioned before; her Land Before Time puppets.

This is actually the collection she's most consistent with gathering every single day.  First thing in the morning she'll ask for her dinosaurs and sometimes, she doesn't even want to play with them, she just wants to pile them somewhere she knows where to find them.

She has a large plastic tub filled with stuffed animals and fairly regularly she likes to sort out all of a certain species of animal.  The middle pile in our mess is comprised of most of our monkeys.

And Brandy, if you're reading this, yes, that one on the right is the one you gave me on my 18th birthday.

And the final pile is another collection of like animals, but this time it's all the elephants we've acquired.

And this group is actually one of the many families in our house.  The black elephant is the Daddy Elephant and the other two are the Mommy and Baby, respectively.

I love watching this kid grow up.  She's always doing something awesome.

The straggler

I forgot to mention and post one of the videos I uploaded in my last batch.  We took it back at the beginning of January on Grant's birthday.  As we were enjoying his chosen treat (an ice cream cake), Kendra had some rather hilarious instructions for us.

She says this from time to time now, and we're not sure where she got it because while we do put forth a great deal of effort to encourage her to eat a bigger variety of food, I don't think that either of us ever just tell her, "EAT IT."

Funny girl.

More fun with two

Yesterday, as I was getting some information I needed off the interwebs, I realized this was happening behind me:

I love how excited Elliot got with each pass!

Speaking of Elliot, he's been doing some fun stuff around here.  Behold:

Actually, this video is dated, he doesn't even crawl like this anymore.  He's totally on all fours all the time now, no more wounded soldier here.  He's growing so fast!

He's also started doing something pretty cute:



Clapping!  I'd forgotten how much FUN older infants are...

Meanwhile, Kendra is adding more and more songs to her repertoire.  We listen to a LOT of music around here...



And she's still a great big sister.  Apparently, she's had plenty of positive reinforcement in her time...

I say it many times a day and I mean it every single time...

I'm just the luckiest Mommy in the whole wide world.