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Ellie is 1! We can’t believe it. She has also made the transition to upright locomotion; yes, she is walking. . . everywhere. . . and very quickly. I spend a lot of time running around after her and trying to keep her head from banging into the walls, furniture, and the floor. We had a birthday party for her and she had a blast. The only upsetting moment for her was when we tried to feed her cake. She put her hands in the icing, looked at her hands, and then started to scream. Apparently, she takes after me and just doesn’t care for cake. I had to comfort her by giving her blueberries.

Josh is still loving his job (doing front end web development) and staying very busy. I’m still just getting started at the Marcus Institute, but so far its going really well. I’m doing a lot of work with children on the autistic spectrum and while its very challenging, I’m also really enjoying it. Outside of work, we’re just enjoying Ellie, and enjoying the fact that everyone we know is having babies! It’s nice because we’re no longer the only people who have to be home by 7:30 at night, and Ellie is going to have lots of playmates! I have to run, but check out the pictures of Ellie walking around!

Well, it’s 2008 and time is moving way too quickly . Ellie is crawling like a champ, but would much prefer to be walking. She actually took three little steps the other night, so we think she’ll be walking very soon. In December, after chronic ear infections and 5 rounds of antiobiotics, we pulled Ellie out of daycare and she got tubes in her ears. The tubes have been wonderful. She recovered by the noon the day that she got them and she has been well ever since. It has been so nice to get to sleep again. We hated pulling her out of daycare, because she really loved the Phoenix School, but we need a little break from the constant illnesses. We’re hoping to re-enroll her this summer or fall. In the meantime, we have a part-time nanny and my mom (Mimi) watches her one day a week (Thank you Mimi!)

In other news, I have just taken a job at the Marcus Institute. For those of you who don’t know, the Marcus Institute is located right next to Emory and it specializes in providing services for children with developmental delays, neurological disorders, autism, etc. . . I’ll be doing therapy and testing in the pediatric neurodevelopmental center and if things work out I’ll get a faculty appointment at Emory as well. The great news is that I’ll only be working 20 hours a week so I’ll still be home a lot with Ellie!

Josh is still loving his new job and staying very busy. He’s been at his new company for almost 4 months now. Over Christmas we stayed in town and spent lots of time with both of our families. Josh’s brother, Jason, and his family (Kim and Madeleine) were in town from Colorado and stayed with us for several days. It was great to spend some time with them and see how much Madeleine and grown.

In other news, we are awaiting the arrival of 3 new nieces/nephews. My sister-in-law, Julie, is due this January (little girl), and my sister is due in March (another baby girl). Kim and Jason are also expecting their second this July. Ellie is excited about all of her new cousins!

We hope to see everyone a lot more in 2008 so hopefully we’ll so you soon!

Take a look at the pictures and you can see that Ellie was a monkey (with a banana on her head) for Halloween. She seemed to really enjoy it. We went to visit Josh at work because his office was throwing a Halloween party for the Boys and Girls club. If you can’t tell from the pictures, he was dressed as Dumbledore. Ellie’s most recent development is that she has become mobile. Two days ago she started crawling forwards, and she’s just getting faster and faster. We’re scrambling to child proof everything, especially the four fireplaces!

Josh and I took a trip to the mountains for our anniversary and Ellie stayed with her Nina and D-dad. Apparently she did great, and we really enjoyed being able to sleep in. Josh is also LOVING his new job and I’m staying much busier than I really have time for. Well right now, Ellie is trying to help me type, so I better run! iughi j

We’re really not very good at updating this, but we did just put up a bunch of new pictures.  Also we have some great news.  Josh just got a new job!  He is shifting away from teaching and starting a new position as a web developer.  He’s been working hard to develop his web design skills so we’re both really excited about the change.  Also, he’ll be working in midtown which is very close to our house, so that is an added bonus.  In Ellie news, she is as cute as ever and growing like a weed.  She can sit on her own now and seems to want to skip crawling and go straight to walking.  She started daycare two weeks ago, which was very hard on me, but she seems to really love it.  She’s only there 2 days a week which is working pretty well so far.  She has also FINALLY  started sleeping through the night which is doing wonders for my sense of overall well being.  Now that I’m finally getting caught up on my sleep I should be out and about a lot more than I have been over the last 6 months.  Well, I hear that she’s waking up from her nap now so I’ve got to run!

Well it’s been a while since I’ve updated this. Between my work schedule and taking care of Ellie there just doesn’t seem to be much time! Since my last posting we celebrated our first mother’s and father’s days, we spent a week at Lake Burton and Ellie had her four month birthday. We’re having lots of fun with her these days–she’s full of smiles and has started to giggle. She’s still managing to deprive us of the precious sleep we’d like to be getting, but she’s so cute that we always seem to forgive her. Josh has been very busy with the summer program at Spelman and he recently took the students down to Sapelo island for a few days. Check out some of the pictures of cool nature stuff down there. Today we took Ellie swimming for the first time and I’m happy to say that she seemed to like the water as much as her parents do. Josh is training for a triathlon this fall and we’re thinking that Ellie may be ready to do it with him if she’s sticks to her training regimen. That’s all for now, but I’ll make sure to update again before she’s walking and talking!

Okay, so I finally figured out how to post on this website (thanks to Josh!) and I’m hoping to keep it much more up-to-date than it has been over the past 3 months.  Of course, we have been quite busy lately!  Ellie is growing in leaps and bounds.  As you can see in some of the pictures she is all smiles these days.  She spends her days smiling, cooing, kicking her legs, waving her arms around, and looking very intently at lights.  She’s sleeping pretty well at night too, so I’m feeling well rested for the first time in quite a while.    We’re still having some feeding issues but she’s gaining weight very well so I think those will work themselves out over time.  I’ve been back to work for a month now, but only three days a week so I’m still able to spend a lot of time with Ellie.  It’s been a fairly easy transition back to work because Josh is with her two days a week and my mom has her once a week, so I know that she’s always in good hands when I’m working.  It’s been great that Josh has been able to take so much time off of work to be with her!  Well, she’s been asleep for about 30 minutes now which means I better get to sleep while I’ve got the chance.

Well, there it is. I suck at updating our site (though I’ve been a little better about the pictures, thanks to Christy). I need to show her how to do this, she’ll be much better at keeping everyone up to date and her writing is also much better than mine. I’ll save the new stuff for Christy to write about this evening in her first blog post.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, so I wanted to give everyone (or two) an update on how things are going here at the house. When Ellie first came home she was a bit jaundiced and had to sleep on a bililight, a special UV light, to help with the jaundice for a couple of nights (check out the flickr photos to see what it looks like, it’s pretty wicked). As you can imagine, she didn’t like it very much. The jaundice was making her sleepy and the light was making her fussy. She also could not open her mouth well enough to feed. All this made for a trying time for Christy and I and an unhappy baby.

Luckily things are going quite a bit better now. Ellie is feeding pretty regularly, she is gaining weight like a champ (for a while she was gaining 2oz/day, the pediatrician said that was great), and Christy is finally getting a bit of sleep each night. Last night she got at least 6 hours…whoo hoo!!

Warning: The following paragraph contains descriptions of little things Ellie is starting to do that possibly only Christy and I care about, but I think it’s exciting so I’m writing it down. If you aren’t that interested in the little things feel free to stop reading now.

Ellie has also started to hold her head up a lot. When we are burping her, she’ll keep her head up and look around a bit (she looks really cute when she does that). We also think she is finally starting to notice and really see us (it’s a really neat feeling). She will also track with her eyes bit (though sometimes she doesn’t, so I may be jumping the gun by saying she’s tracking). That’s all for now.

So, we set up a blog after Ellie was born, but i didn’t like any of the templates.  I wanted to make my own.  Well, I didn’t have time to do all of that so I modified a template and I really like how the  site looks now.  Hope everyone enjoys it and feel free to leave comments for us.