Elise makes her daddy proud

Elise has been busy developing into her own little person. I know she's growing up and everything, but it comes on so gradually that you don't really notice it all the time and you go about feeding them and cleaning up after them and breaking up fights. And then, bam, all of the sudden one day she says to you:

Elise: "Mommy, what did the ear say to the other ear?"
Me (a little confused): "I don't know."
Elise: "I want a hot dog!!!" (hysterical laughter)

So, I guess now she has a sense of humor. She repeated this over and over with other body parts. And it was still funny. That's a sign of a good joke right there. Pretty soon she'll be writing her own blog. And it'll probably be funnier than mine.

Family picture fail

My brother Josh was here last week visiting and while he was here he introduced us to http://failblog.org, a blog dedicated to documenting people falling short of success in various activities (click the g-rated version if you must, trust me.) And since he has a nicer camera than us still, we also tried to have him take some pictures of the four of us. When that turned out to be a complete disaster I realized that we are our own little family picture failblog. We have never been coordinated enough to hold our children down while making them smile and act like they love us and are enjoying the time we spend together. We like to keep trying, but we know it all amounts to nothing. Here are a few choice ones. (And yes, I just spent 10 minutes typing "fail" on all these. It makes it funnier.)

I like Ben's face here. Granted, Elise is yanking is his hair, but we're trying to take a picture here!

Trying to bring Elise into the fold

Take out Chloe and this might have actually be a decent picture. She kind of puts a damper on the whole picture though.
Sometimes parents make mistakes too.
I like the lady staring at us struggle with Elise.Chloe decides to take a little snooze during the picture taking.

Elise's pants have become unbuttoned while struggling to take this picture. That pretty much sums it all up.

A big thank you to family and friends for attempting to take pictures of us. We know it's not easy!