Bath Time

Eli LOVES his bath time. Recently we have let him take baths in our bathtub because it is a lot deeper than his tub and I'm not as afraid of him trying to get out in it. In his tub he can get his leg over the edge. His favorite things recently is splashing like crazy. When he does it I give him a shocked look and he laughs and laughs and then splashes again like crazy. It's a fun game we play.

Fun Toys

I love that kids will find anything ordinary and have a blast with it. Once day while doing laundry I left the basket where Eli could get it. Before I got my camera he had it on the ground and would crawl into it and then out of it over and over. He thought it was so fun. Then he stood up with it on him and started walking around. He had a great time, until he wanted it off and couldn't figure out how to do that. 

This little man brings us so much joy. We love watching him explore and just have a great time with simple ordinary things like a laundry basket. 

Halloween

Eli finally started walking all over the place. It was kind of crazy how fast he went from taking a few steps a day to not crawling at all. Being able to walk makes playing outside so much fun! And since he could walk, we were super excited to take him trick or treating. We started kind of early since Eli goes to bed early, and since he walked most of the time we only went to a few houses. But that was totally fine with us because I didn't want Eli eating tons of candy. He has a pretty bad sweet tooth. 

He tried to go in most of the houses that we went to. When the person in the house would put the candy bowl down for him to pick one sometimes he would look at the candy selection and then walk away. We would just tell the people that he didn't need the candy and we were really only doing this for the experience. 

By the end of the night he had about 10 pieces of candy, including a full size twix bar. The house that was passing out the full size candy bars, set the bucket down for Eli to pick one out and he promptly grabbed the whole bucket and started to walk away. Then when we told him that he couldn't have the whole bucket but could pick one, he grabbed one right out of the middle.

We all had a great night, and it was so fun to see Eli knocking on the doors and saying hi to everyone. This picture is Eli practicing the parts of the face. He knows exactly what eyes are and can say eye very well. This is him pointing to Dad's nose. 

The Many faces of Eli

For the most part Eli is a very happy boy. He's always making us laugh and doing cute things. If you lay on the floor he will come over to you and kiss you (open mouth of course). He has a fantastic fake cheesy smile, and he loves to eat. He now says thank you, or at least it sounds pretty close to that, when you give him food, and if he wants you to come over to him, either to help him walk or just because he wants you, he will wave you over with his hand. 

I don't know how, but he knows the exact moment I open the dishwasher and he will come over to "help". He is actually pretty good at unloading with me - he will take things out and hand them to me, it's just my job to get them before he puts them on the floor. The only issue is when he helps me unload while I am trying to load it. 

He does super cute things all the time, but he doesn't always want to do them again if I get a camera. Here are a few of the things that I have managed to capture.

At the Children's Museum. He had a blast climbing on everything.

He's not sad, just likes to squint his eyes when he gives you a fake smile.

Again at the Children's museum. He thought he was pretty cool climbing up the ramp.

First time having nutella. He made a complete mess, but it was almost bath time so I let him get it wherever he wanted. 

He thought I was pretty hysterical sticking my head out from behind the camera. Occasionally, usually around bedtime, we can get a great deep belly laugh out of him.  

Just one example of how he climbs on everything. This is him standing on the front of his walker. 

Caribbean Cruise 2014 - Part 2: Cruising

When we weren't having an awesome time on excursions, we had a great time on the ship. We mainly swim, ate, slept, ate, rock climbed, ate some more, boogie boarded, ganged up on Mom while playing games and of course ate. It was a fantastic week. Here are a few of things we did, in no particular order. 

Getting ready to rock climb

Cory and me racing. I gave him a head start, so I didn't feel too bad when he beat me. 

Viddy and me mocking Mom and her scary shark face (refer to picture from previous post)

Waiting to leave Jamaica 

One of the formal nights. Don't we look good!?!

Brent and Rachel

Our amazing waiter, Richard, singing to Viddy for his birthday

Cory somehow got entered in the sexiest man competition (he may or may not have gone up after he thought we entered him in). Don't let this picture fool you, Cory has NO moves!

Sushi at Izumi

Boogie boarding

Eating and swimming

Viddy boogie boarding. 

I know that things get funnier later in the night, and that might have had something to do with why we all died laughing when we killed Mom off in the game Bang before she even had a chance to play. Tim played a card that allowed him to take a card from Brent and all Tim said was "All I need is a gun." As I write this I realize you really just had to be there to understand why it was so funny, but with that, Tim got a gun and took Mom's last life. She was dead before she even had a chance to play, which was a little sad because she was one of the good guys, but that was a chance we were willing to take. 

I think that we all had a good time, even Mom when we wouldn't let her live long enough to play the games. We had a great week, but I realized the next vacation we went on, there was no way that we could leave Eli at home (with family). I knew that he was being well taken care of and having a blast with his cousins (I got daily updates which was awesome) but there were a lot of times that I would just pull out my phone and look at pictures of him because I missed him so much. He's just such a happy kid and so much fun to be around. But more on that later...

Caribbean Cruise 2014 - Part 1: Excursions

 Earlier this year David convinced me that we should go on another cruise to the Caribbean. I loved the last one that we went on, and this one was a pretty good deal, so there wasn't a whole lot of convincing involved. What I didn't know was that he had invited my whole family to go with us.
When I went out to California in July I was talking to my dad and he was asking me about the cruise that we were planning on going on. I started telling him all about and told him that he should come with us. He said something about being on a boat for a week with Mom might make him go crazy...totally understandable :) So I told him that Mom could come watch Eli and he could go with us. While we were having this conversation in the car, I was texting David, telling him I think my dad should come with us and also looking up flights to see if it would be reasonable. Well my dad tells me that he will have to talk to Mom and David tells me that he will talk to my dad and invite them. I honestly didn't think anything would happen from that. Little did I know that they had already booked the cruise and plane tickets out to Houston.
The next day I was talking to David on the phone and he finally told me that my parents were already planning on coming and he had invited my brothers, but they hadn't said yes yet. So I called all of my brothers and within 30 minutes everyone said that they would go. To say that I was excited is an understatement. This was the first time that my family had done anything big and crazy like this.
We stopped in Cozumel Mexico, where we took a ferry to the mainland, and then went to Tulum Ruins and then had an amazing authentic Mexican lunch on the beach and got to go swimming for a little bit.

There were tons of iguanas!

Its a little hard to see, but the carving under the awning represents the descending God. 

Outlook from Tulum

 

Having fun on the bus

Where we stopped for lunch

 

In front of our ship. 

The next day we stopped at Grand Cayman Island where we took a catamaran to Stingray City. This was probably our favorite excursion this time. There were so many stingrays, and although it was a little frightening, we eventually got used to the feeling of them rubbing against us.

Of course when I say "we" I mean everyone but Mom. This is her freaking out a little under water. She will probably disown me for posting this picture, but it is just that awesome that I couldn't resit.

 

And here again...

 

One of my favorite pictures of my dad from the cruise. 

And another good one!

Although there's a finger in the way, I like this picture because I think it shows how many stingrays there actually are there. 

These are from the catamaran. If you every have the opportunity to go to the Cayman Islands, I would highly recommend Stingray City and taking a catamaran to get there was awesome because we were in a pretty small group so we really got to interact with the stingrays. 

The last day of excursions we stopped in Jamaica and took a bus to Doctors Cove. This was a pretty relaxed just chilling at the beach and snorkeling.

   

There were some amazing fish and cool coral formations. 

Hard to see, but this is me diving for a shell. 

Back flop. That one hurt... a lot. David and Rachel made the back flips look so easy I thought it couldn't be that hard. It took me three tries to finally get something that might have resembled a back flip. 

And this is almost the exact moment I lost my sea pass card. I had it tucked away "safely" in my swimsuit and when I dove I didn't realize that it came out when my swimsuit didn't stay in place. It made getting onto the boat a little challenging, but nothing major. 

We had a great time everywhere we stopped. Stay tuned for part two of the cruise adventure.