and this is what we do
Oct 15
Steph and I love to see the elephants, giraffes and other big animals at the zoo. But those zoo people had their thinking caps on when they also included a petting zoo at the Nashville Zoo – the kids love it! There you can get up close and personal with those rarest of all barnyard animals – the goats. Eli had a blast.
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Oct 13
This past weekend our good friend Cassie got married and moved away to Ohio. Sad news for us, but we’re happy for Cassie, and it was a wonderful wedding on a beautiful October afternoon. It had to be a great day because, well, they got married on our anniversary!
Steph was Cassie’s Matron of Honor, which put me on baby duty for most of the afternoon. I was also on music duty, which was relatively easy because it just amounted to pressing buttons on a CD player. Here’s a few pics after getting all dressed up. And bonus for the weekend – we got to see Rachel and her wonderfully beautiful and growing family.
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Aug 28
Eli is now able to sit up well enough on his own that he has graduated to riding in the child’s seat of shopping carts at stores (or “buggy”, as the Southerners say). Here he is on a little jaunt to Target this week.
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Aug 04
So this little man is sitting up now, all on his own. Well, mostly on his own. He gets a little topsy after he’s been sitting for a while and forgets he doesn’t have anything holding him up. We’ve learned to pile giant stuffed animals directly behind him in the event he gets a little out of control.
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Aug 02
Well, it would seem that the fear of a financial meltdown in Washington D.C. has come and gone. But just in case things took a turn for the worse this morning, we were ready.
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Jul 20
We took our first plunge today into the pool with Eli! He has loved bathtime for months, so we figured hitting up the swimming pool wouldn’t be a huge transition. We thought he would take right to kicking and laughing (like he does in the tub), and that he would be a little Michael Phelps for us. Hopes have been dashed though… yes, he loves the water, but he’s just going to be a lazy beach bum, sipping lemonade and soaking in the summer rays.
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Jul 11
When you go on a 2,000 mile road trip with a four month old, you pack nearly all of your personal belongings. It looks like this.
Uncle Josh met Eli for the first time in Minnesota. They both played with Cookie Monster together.
Eli also met Grandpa Fjordbak and Great-Grandma Fjordbak up in Alexandria.
We ate pizza at an outdoor brick fired pizza farm, which was a ton of fun. Huge, authentic pizzas with homegrown vegetables. And Eli met his first sheep.
Here we are putting on overalls – he’s as excited as he looks!
This hammer is a treasured Burns family heirloom passed down through the generations from baby to baby. Well, actually, it was my brother’s and he chewed on it for a while in 1985 and now Eli is chewing on it.
The porch is a wonderful place to hang out with a baby… especially that swing. He absolutely loved it, and if he was ever fighting sleep, five minutes on the swing would put him out fast.
And Grandma Stolz got to meet Eli too. That’s a fuzzy owl in the picture, given to him by his Uncle Joey.
Rochester is known for having lots of geese at Silver Lake, so we went to see them. The little geese thought Eli was cool because he was little too.
And finally, we were able to catch a Twins game at the new Target Field stadium in Minneapolis. It was a blast! It was also a strangely cold night… I think the wind chill might have been below 32 degrees up in the third deck by the end of the night. It was a ton of fun though, and the cold didn’t stop us from eating our traditional frosty malt.
Jun 29
Steph and Eli made a trip to the zoo this morning with our friends Krista and Ryleigh. While not his first trip to the Nashville Zoo, it was the first one he was conscious for. He slept through every exhibit the last time around. Lesson Learned: Don’t go to the zoo during nap time.
Steph says his favorite of the trip were the elephants, and I imagine they are about the biggest thing he’s seen in his short life. Actually, they’re the largest land mammal on the planet aren’t they, so they’re the biggest thing any of us have seen.
Here are the adventurer’s themselves:
And finally, Eli checking out the meerkats. The meerkat exhibit is by far the most popular destination at the Nashville Zoo. They’re right near the entrance, and, without fail, every time you walk in you will see 200 kids with faces plastered up against the glass peering in at 200 meerkats running around, burrowing, and wrestling each other, all the while wondering why 200 kids are peering in at them.
Jun 29
Yes, you know we had a baby. I’m happy to announce that we did actually get Eli’s birth announcements out to family members before he turned six months old. Our dear friend Meg took some fantastic newborn pictures of Eli when he was just a couple weeks old. We had been holding off on posting them online, waiting to get the announcements out first.
So here’s a few favorites from the shoot and a fun little look back at the first week of February! Thanks Meg for the great pics!
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