On the road

We're in Cleveland with some things on our minds here...no posting for a little while.

Merry Christmas to all.

Snickers

The dog has been unjustly underrepresented on the blog.

Here she is in her Browns colors. She doens't know the team is 4-9. All she knows is she's pretty with a scarf on. 

Fancy-schmancy photo

My mom or dad took this one and I played around with it on Picasa. Have I mentioned Picasa?

My mom & Ellie

 

My dad & Ellie

 

Ellie in a Christmas dress

If I tried, I probably couldn't come up with a more visually confusing series of patterns. We had just come home from a "holiday" party and it was late, and I wanted to get the picture quickly.

Maybe we'll post a series of pics with her in her other Christmas dresses. Maybe not, it all depends on what we get to. 

Baby, swimming in a snowsuit

She'll sleep like this for two and a half hours. 

Me 'n' baby sleeping

Taken by my ma. 

Sign o' the Times

Seen this morning on the front doors of the local Sears:

"Merry Christmas"

The signs appear to be sort of hastily done. Not that they were in Magic Marker or anything, but they were simple black-and-white without a lot of the corporate marketing frilly stuff that usually goes on corporate messages. It looks to me like they're trying to avoid the boycott of places like Target that refuse to say "Christmas" in their ads.

I say, boycott away. If a store refuses to make Christmas part of its Christmas-shopping season promotions, let's give them what they want and refuse to make that store part of our Christmas shopping. It's not like much of the shopping binge that starts on the day after Thanksgiving and magically happens to end on December 24th, only to be followed by a returning binge that starts December 26th, is anything but Christmas shopping. Sorry...Chanukkah isn't that big a holiday, certainly not a big shopping holiday. Kwanzaa? Please. Christmas is what retail is all about...and if they refuse to acknowledge it? Fine with me. They won't get my money. (And no, "Xmas" just won't do.)

We have some Target gift cards...I won't use them until Christmas is over. I don't totally hate Target or anything -- I just want them to get the message.

Sorry so slow

Tina's been working last week & this, so I've been Daddy Day Care. I'll just say that I haven't gotten any dissertation work done.

Here's a pic of Ellie in her red hat with bear's ears (part of a whole red bear outfit...why a red bear outfit is cute or even appropriate I don't know).

Mammaw update

OK, so I got the story all wrong. Mammaw decided on her own to go by Mammaw, in tribute to her mother Fran Knox, who was "Mama" (pronounced "Mawmaw").

Here's Mama from Christmas a few years ago. She's since gone home to the Lord. Quite a woman, apparently, with a fascinating family history. I really wish I'd gotten to know her better. I guess I'll have to wait a spell. 

Thanksgiving trip

We're of course immensely thankful for all we have, and all that God has blessed us with (and the floods, earthquakes, etc. kept away from us!). Here in this life, we have loving families and our beautiful Ellie (Elizabeth! quoth the mother) to care for and raise. And after this life, of course, we have an eternity of fellowship with Christ Jesus through God's grace.

Yet in light of that, we're still pretty disappointed with the last week. We were in Cincinnati on Wednesday when we got word (fairly randomly -- Tina heard it from a woman in a store) that an Alberta clipper was making its way toward Cleveland for Thanksgiving morning. We did our best weather-predicting and decided it wasn't worth the risk to take Ellie through that kind of weather. Were it just us & Snickers, we'd've taken the chance, but not with the baby. So we nixed the journey up north and didn't get to see my family. Apparently, it was a pretty wise move - from Medina on up, the weather and the driving got pretty rough, from what I heard.

So we'll do our best to make it up at Christmas, but it would've been nice to be there this weekend.

Ellie & Pappaw

Here's Ellie and her Pappaw, also known as Tina's father Phil.

Phil's lucky...he's been on the giving and "receiving" ends of World Vision gifts this year...have you? 

Ellie & Grampa

Here's Ellie and her Grampa, also known as Tina's stepdad Ron (or Ronnie or Blackie or whatever...virtually everyone in the Tri-State area knows him as something).

(Tri-State here means Ohio, Kentucky & Indiana. There are probably many many "tri-state areas" across the country. 

Mammaw and Ellie

The first kid in the family gets certain privileges by default. Nicholas started calling his grandma "Mammaw," so that's her name. And now she's Mammaw to all the kids.

Here she is with Ellie. 

Someone's not happy...

...but Ellie looks pretty smiley, eh? (For the literal-minded among my readership: no, not really, I'm kidding.)

She'd gotten quite a few pictures taken and I think she was hungry (hence the bib).

(By the way I only mention the literal-mindedness because an early, post-Super Bowl post criticized Terrell Owens quite dryly, and some among my readership didn't get the joke.)

Nice close-up profile

I wish I'd gotten this without the bottle. But we have to take pictures of what's really happening. (until I get Photoshop, that is, and then I can make pictures of whatever I want.)

This was taken in color but I used a filtered B&W effect in Picasa.

Her eye is just perfect. So's her nose. And her cheek, and her eyebrow & lashes, and... 

Who knew?

We tried some rubber nipples, rather than the silicone ones we'd been using. Huge difference...Ellie eats a lot faster. Like 7 minutes to eat 3 ounces rather than 25ish minutes. Huh.

I don't know if the rubber ones flow faster (I'm not about to test!) or she likes the taste (her pacifiers are rubber) or what...but we'll be getting more rubber ones.

By the way

DSL is back up.

I wouldn't have uploaded those pics by dial-up.

Another pic of the gown

Here's an artsy blue one.

Neat-o. 

Ellie in Tina's Christening gown

We tried to get a look-alike pic of Ellie in Tina's gown to match the one Tina has.

But instead we got this big ol' smile.

I'm happy with this. 

Here's a grin

Here's Ellie after a good feeding. Ignore the Cincinnati Reds bib...it's only good to puke on.

Similarly, she's been using White Cloud Diapers lately. Happily, they're adorned with the "art" of John Lennon. What better to poop on? 

Sorry no posts lately...DSL modem is down. Also, we'll be out of town next week for Thanksgiving so it may be a little while until we get some regular updates posted.

World Vision

I've replaced the Google Adsense stuff at the top & side with banners for World Vision, a worldwide Christian charity involved in a whole load o' good works. Tina and I sponsor a girl in Ethiopia through WV, and the Michigan State PhD students in Accounting sponsor a girl in Sri Lanka, too.

Plus, for Christmas this year, Tina and I have decided that rather than buying each other some worthless trinkets we've never needed and will just give away later or put on a shelf and dust every six months or so, we're going to buy a goat for a family somewhere who needs milk, food and income.

Click on the banners or a link in this post and see what you might be able to do for someone. None of this is for our "aren't we so generous" glory...but rather to give WV a little push and publicity, and to encourage a few people to think about the options of child sponsorship and the giving of gifts to those who truly need.

Kick-toy

Here's a better view, although I'm not sure why it's so oddly angled. Maybe Tina was falling over when she took it. 

Ellie's toy

This is Ellie with her kick-toy, or whatever it's called. She kicks a bar at the bottom and some rollers spin, like a slot machine.

She does it for minutes on end. (Hey, she's only 2 months old...she doesn't do much for minutes on end except cry when she's hungry.) 

I'm ready for my close-up

Just a whiff of a smile there. She smiles bigger and sticks her tongue out at her mommy now.

That's not very nice, is it, Ellie? 

Ellie's new best friend

Here's Ellie's new friend, courtesy of the magic fingers of our friend Debbie Antone. As soon as Ellie saw Ann, her face lit up and she reached out to her.

They even called each other to make sure their clothes matched on the day they met.

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 

A worse pic of Mom 'n' Swee'pea

This is really blurry because I took it without the flash. I wanted to get the spider from the pumpkin. 

Why I don't really like cats

This photo is completely un-retouched. He just looks that way!

Well, no, not really, I did a lot to it. But those weird flashes in the eyes were there. Otherwise, such a trustworthy face. 

Nickname update

I've been using a lot of "Ellie Bean" and "Ellie Belly." "Ellie May" seems to creep in, too.

I like Ellie more than Elly or Elli or Ellee...but I could go a bit different and spell it "Elie." "Elizabeth" has only one "l" in it. But it might look like is should sound like "Eli." Or I could never ever write it down and then it doesn't matter how it's spelled. But then I'd have to stop blogging, or type "Elizabeth" every time. Hmmm.

(- Do all philosophers start with an "S"?

-- Yeah, I think most of them do.

- Nietzsche doesn't start with an "S".

-- Ah, but there's an "S" in Nietzsche.

- Oh yeah, so there is.

-- Waiter, this conversation isn't very good.)

A better pic of Mom 'n' Swee'pea

You can see Tina & Ellie better here, plus I think you can see the spider's legs on the pumpkin.

Ellie looks really really interested in...well, something. She's kind of looking over my left shoulder... 

More same-night photos

Here's me holding a pea pod with a face.

By the way, my head's not quite as misshapen as it appears...there's a shadow from the flash on the wall behind me. 

Weird things afoot...well, amouth

Ellie's been drooling a lot and seems to be chewing on things (nipples, pacifier) in addition to sucking. Those are early signs of teething. Not that we think we have an early-developmental freak or anything, but we're hoping she doesn't teethe quite yet.

Here's a de-saturated close-up. I kinda like how the pacifier stayed pretty colored-in, but the rest of the picture got washed out.