Pre-Halloween lull

Nothing much is going on that's exciting. Eliza walks just like a big girl now. She's all over the house and can nearly run. She's learning to say "Who's that?" when she looks at pictures and can usually identify herself and Brian. She'll say "Dada" and "E-za" or "E-za-za". She still can't really say "Mama". She will, however, say "Hi".

As Brian said in the last post, we went to Kings Island for our second trip to Howl-o-Fest/Halloween Haunt. Here's a video of Eliza riding the Nick-O-Round in her ballerina duck costume.



The weather is unusually brisk for this time of year. We've been hanging out inside by the fireplace and enjoying each other's company. What a nice fall season this has been so far.

More Kings Island!

I swear, we should live there. We're honestly thinking about getting season passes for next year, we've been so many times.

Mom and Lee came up for a few days, so we decided to go Saturday and do both Howl-o-Fest and Halloween Haunt.

This necessitated getting Eliza a Halloween costume early, so we officially scrapped the Super Martian Robot Girl costume in favor of a duck ballerina outfit that is so adorable, it just might break your computer.

Once we got to the park, Janie, Lee and I got in what will be our last ride on Scooby Doo before Cedar Fair rebrands the entire kid section to Planet Snoopy. As is to be expected, I smoked both of them at the shooting game, because I have killer Duck Hunt skills.

After that, Janie and Mom took Eliza off for some kid stuff while Lee and I got in line for Diamondback, which is the seventh-fastest coaster in North America.

That fact, incidentally, was one that I didn't share with Lee until about halfway up the lift hill.

After a nice ride on Diamondback, we somehow convinced Mom to actually get on a coaster, which meant that Janie stayed with Eliza while the rest of us piled onto the artist formerly known as The Italian Job. Mom did surprisingly well, especially for someone with severe motion sickness and a bad back.

After a little walking around and some bumper cars, Janie tended to a now-fussy Eliza while we climbed on the red side of Racer (the blue side was closed.) As I love to do on wooden coasters, I made us go for the very back, and I've now done a 100 percent hands-up ride on both sides of Racer.

Mom swore off any more coasters for the rest of the night, and we decided to grab dinner at what is normally one of the best deals in the park, the Coney Mall Subway.

This time, however, the Subway was apparently staffed by people with no clue, as they asked Janie if she wanted a footlong sub even though you can't actually order one (we had to pay for two 6-inch subs at $6 a piece, which kills the good deal.)

After we ate, Lee and I tried to grab a quick ride on Invertigo, but we ended up in line for close to an hour. Very foggy from a combination of the fog machines that looked like they were spraying for mosquitoes and actual fog.

Then came what was something of a mistake, even though it was something we wanted to do: BEAST.

Riding The Beast at night is an amazing experience. Riding it, as I got to on our last trip, with the brakes pretty much off, is even more amazing, but it was still good Saturday. There's just something about tearing off into the helix in the dark that's thrilling.

What wasn't amazing, though, was the wait. The line was actually backed up to the arcade before you go up the hill to Beast Canyon, and when we finally got to Beast Canyon, the ride clock said 45 minutes. Oh, how wrong it was.

Lee and I managed to wind up onto the ramp to the ride building when the announcement came that The Beast was closing for fireworks. Janie then called to let us know that a park employee told her it was down 30 minutes because of the fireworks.

It ended up being an almost 2.5 hour wait, and by that time Eliza and Janie were freezing to death, so Lee and I hiked back to the front gate to head home.

Despite the wait on Beast (literally the longest ride wait of my life), it was still the best KI trip we've made yet, and we're already thinking about 2010.

She's a walker!

It's official now: this child can WALK. Alone. For some distance.

Janie and I went to Kings Island for Haunt on Saturday night and left Eliza with her grandmother for the evening. We got a call letting us know that she was walking all over the house while we were there, but we wanted to see it for ourselves.

Sunday afternoon, she was walking across the living room all by herself. She's still a little ungainly with it, and she walks with her hands up like she's guarding John Stockton, but it's walking.

Up next: RUNNING. Oh yeah, it's coming.

Ezaza is 13-months-old

Eliza can say her name now. It sounds like Ezaza, but she makes a pretty solid attempt. Last night, she very clearly said "Eliza" in this throaty growl she makes. Brian looked at me and said "You did just hear her say her name, right?"

She's making small attempts to walk on her own, but she can't take more than 2 or 3 steps without losing her balance and falling down. Mostly she'll opt to sit down and crawl to her destination, but she's slowly growing more brave.

Today she's 13-months-old!

Edit: Oh, okay. By popular (and by popular, I mean my Mom) demand, we've decided to continue on with Raggedy Ann pictures. At least we'll try monthly 'til she's two.

Oh, and one more thing...

Eliza took two steps tonight. People claim she's done this before, but I just now saw it with my own eyes. She was extremely wobbly, but this is progress!

Flashback 2008

A few days ago I found my old Sprint phone and decided to see what was on it. To my surprise, I found lots of pictures from Eliza's first couple of months. I totally lucked out. I thought every picture from that era had been lost when our laptop was stolen.







She's growing up so very fast. This week we realized she's been making attempts at saying her own name. It sounds like a throaty "Za Za" at this point, but she does resond appropriately when you ask her name. She still isn't walking on her own, but last weekend she stood for a good 30 seconds on her own before she realized what she was doing, chickened out and sat down.

In other news, we've really been busy beyond all reason. We routinely stumble through the door at about 7PM, get up at 6AM and do it all over again. Eliza spends her days playing at her Grammy's house while Daddy and Mommy bring home the bacon. Luckily we've had some weekend fun lately. Last Sunday we decided to head to Cincinnati to a Bengals game. We we sitting on the very back row, but there isn't a bad seat in Paul Brown stadium. Here's a little video of the view from our seats.



This past Friday, we headed out to Christ the King Oktoberfest to see The Minus 5 put on the most rockin' show a church fundraiser has ever seen. Unfortunately, the crowd proved to be a bit much for Eliza, so she headed to Grammy's and called it an early night. We got to have a parents' night out. We got to shake hands with Peter Buck from R.E.M., too. Here's some video of Brian being too chicken to go up and say hello. I had to take the initiative and shake his hand first so Brian would go behind me. Here's a little video of Brian pondering the possibility of shaking Peter Buck's hand and chickening out.



We've been planning our winter this morning and the holiday time is going to be fantastic this year. I'm so excited. I just hope we have enough room for the Christmas tree in our living room. But first, Halloween.

Busy times!

I spent all last week at home with Eliza as part of what corporate has obfuscatingly termed "work reduction" (read: unpaid furlough.) The upside to that was, we got to have a lot of fun. We went to the park one afternoon, we went to the store, we played games, we took naps. Fun was had by all.

Tonight, we had spaghetti for dinner, which meant Eliza got to play with her food a little.



As you can see, Eliza had some fun with it.

She did scare us a little last night by waking up at 4 a.m. screaming for no reason. That's extremely unlike her.