what a cutie!

here's some fun pics of Eliana lately. She's getting so big and we are way overdue on a bunny meter picture, so hopefully we will get one of those taken soon.

here she is with our friend, Jane, who helped us find our apartment. Jane couldn't believe how strong she was and how much she loved to smile.
she loves her tummy time these days and is always pushing up and scooting backwards. today, she even lifted her little tushy off the ground! i will be chasing after her any day now i think!here she is modeling her cute little overall dress. yes, it is winter here and is very cold, but our house is sooo warm, that we wear things like this while inside and then put on the rest of the layers right before we go outside. we are definitely thankful for a heater that works though!
thanks, Cousin Michelle, for my cute dress, and, Nanny, for my cute little lady bug berets!
we did have a really good thanksgiving with some other foreigners in our city and were so thankful for the fellowship we had with them. we had the complete meal minus the turkey, played games, watched football online, and watched a christmas movie to top it all off!

Eliana and I have spent a lot of time in doors trying to stay warm and also fighting sickness. Eliana recently had a cold, which led to pink eye, and then later also led to an ear infection. so, we have taken two trips up to the american doctor in the capital city for check ups for her and the meds needed to clear up the pink eye and the ear infection. so not fun, but we are so thankful that the capital city is close enough to do that when needed. so, it seems we have either been homebound or on a bus for the last two or three weeks, but it seems to be almost back to normal now.

she's still loving her solids. i laughed today when i went to buy the vegetables i needed to make her food. i spent about $1.50 for her carrots and sweet potatoes, which will probalby last her about three weeks i think along with all the other things i already have made and frozen for her. if only our food was that cheap!! :)

okay, i think i am rambling now, so i will just close this post out and promise to post more later when i am not quite so much in a zombie state! :)

It's Official!

Eliana is holding (or crumpling is a better word for it) in her cute little hands our e-tickets to America!! that's right, we three Vips are traveling afar to the land of the free and the home of the brave! We'll be in the DFW area February 6-21 for some fun time with family and friends. since our time is so short, we are just staying in the DFW area, which means there are lots of fun people we won't get to see, but hopefully we can work out a way to see them when we come back this summer. So...see you soon!!

New Friends!

Like i said in another post, we have some friends who recently moved here to study at the same school Vip is at, and we have gotten to enjoy playing with them lately. I don't think that Eliana quite understands just how exciting this is, but she is starting to really enjoy the time with her little friend. there is even another family coming next semester who also has a little girl, who is a little younger than Eliana, so pretty soon there will be three little princesses running around! we can't wait! I especially cannot begin to describe how nice it has been this last month to have a friend around who i can talk and share with in my heart language, and the fact that pretty soon there will be another one is just too much to handle! I feel like the Father has been very good to us to get us through the loneliness of the last two years and is now just blessing us beyond measure as He has given us our little Elly Bean and now new friends to share our lives with using our heart language!!

the girls liked helping me play the piano!we had a fun little game going in the Pizza Hut pushing Eliana around in the high chair. thankfully, both of the girls liked it!

Fall Fun!

we don't really celebrate halloween in the traditional sense that a lot of americans do, but it is a pretty fun excuse to dress up your little baby in costumes and take fun pictures, so we did do that October 31! my friend and I went shopping to see what we could find for our little girls and we just happened to stumble upon a shop that had just two costumes in it (the only ones we found in the entire mall!) that were the perfect sizes for our little girls. AND they were a pair...piglet and tigger! how fun is that? so, here's our little tigger with her new friend, piglet! we also went to the steak restaurant that our city now has (yummy!) and enjoyed an oh so tasty steak dinner while the locals tried to figure out how exactly you celebrate this American holiday. they at least got the costume part down, but the rest of it was a little bazzarr.

the waitress let me borrow her funky green wig for the picture, but eliana was still asleep for the picture! oh well!

needless to say, vip was pretty excited about the tigger costume. geaux tigers! i even got her costume for next yer at the same shop....an authentic adidas LSU cheerleader outfit! who would of thunk it?

life lately

bath time! well, we dont' do this everyday for bath time, but i thought that we would make it special one day last week. i've been looking everwhere for an exersaucer or jumper of some sort for her to play with, and the only ones we can find are in other cities and around 200 USD, so we've opted to do without one of those to say the least! anyways, we bought her this fun floaty in thailand that has holes for her feet to hang out of, so i filled the bathtub out, plopped her inside, and wha la! an aquatic exersaucer!! she LOVED it!
some new friends that moved her recently bought a wii with them for all of us to play with. Vip has had a good time with it to say the least! we were over there one night recently and Eliana really wanted to be held, so he strapped her on and played wii golf with her. she really liked helping daddy out, but i think she might have hurt his golf game in the end!
Elly's 6 month birthday!! we decided to celebrate by going to Pizza Hut for dinner, and Eliana tried out the big girl high chair for the first time!! she did pretty good, but we learned to wait to put her in it until the food arrives so she doesn't get too tired of it by the time we want to eat!

We've eased into a pretty nice morning routine most days. Eliana wakes up around 7-7:30, we bring her into our bed to nurse and just wiggle a little while we wake up a little bit more. then, we all mosey on out to the kitchen table for breakfast and quiet times. sometimes, she is ready for her morning nap by the time we get around to the Good Book time, but sometimes she isn't, which is always entertaining! she's getting to the point now where she just wants to grab whatever is in front of her, no matter how delicate the pages are!! so, needless to say, we have started waiting for her morning nap to read our Good Books or we take turns watching her while the other one reads and spends time with Dad.
she LOVES goofing around with Daddy, and with a Daddy this fun, who could blame her? like Daddy's new pink bear hat? i picked it out especially for him!!
i can hardly keep her still these days....she will be crawling before i know it! ahhh!
her favorite thing to do...raspies! just blow your lips together till all the spit starts to fly and there's a fun buzzing sound and that's what she's doing in this picture right now. can you hear it?
she's not sitting up on her own yet, but she likes to practice on mommy's lap or propped up in a chair.