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After Eli was born, my friend Charles from work offered to take professional photos of Eli and us once Eli was old enough. We knew that Charles, owner of the design services company CodeModern, does great work and takes awesome photos, but we’d been waiting until Eli was old enough to sit up on his own. Well Eli has become a master-sitter recently, so this past month we took Charles up on his offer. We met him at a nearby park and he proceeded to click away with an assortment of cameras. The results really show the benefit of a photographer’s eye and a good camera.

Eli has always been a happy baby, but recently he’s just been completely full of smiles and giggles. We’ve discovered that it’s often the silliest things that get him to laugh. In this case, just dropping a ball in front of him caused him to chuckle in the amazingly cute way that only babies can. I can’t help but laugh myself every time I hear him laugh.

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Eli has gotten very talkative lately and there’s one thing he loves to say most:

This week Eli turned 7-months old. While he didn’t hit any major milestones this month (like smiling, laughing, rolling, sitting, etc. the previous months), it’s still amazing to watch him change. This was probably Nicole’s favorite month at home with him. He’s able to sit and play with toys and his ability to manipulate objects with his hands has greatly improved. The result is that he no longer bangs himself in the head with rattles and he is able to get teethers into his mouth on his own. Last month he was able to roll both ways, but it wasn’t until the end of this month that he began doing it while playing on a regular basis.

Eli is slowly starting to enjoy solid food although he’s only eating solids at dinner time. So far he likes pears, carrots, and apples the best. He’ll also eat sweet potatoes and prunes but we suspect prunes cause him to puke so he won’t be those again for a while. He’ll eat peas only when mixed with carrots and he wanted nothing to do with bananas and won’t eat plain cereal or oatmeal now that he’s had food with flavor.

No teeth have poked through yet, but Eli’s teething seems to be getting more intense so were anticipating a tooth or two any time now. He’s also started babbling! Before he was cooing and then vocalizing Oohs and Aahs, but now there are definitely consonant vowel combinations, especially when he’s upset. It’s almost as amusing as his laugh.

Eli continues to sleep about 10-10.5 hours uninterrupted each night for which we’re very grateful! His occasional off night reminds how far we’ve come. Until this week he was also doing well with naps – taking two 1.5 hour naps and a third short catnap before dinner. We’re not sure if he’s trying to drop down to two naps or if teething is just throwing him off recently but even when he’s “off” he still takes at least one 1.5 hour nap each day, so we can’t complain too much.

You can find all of the pictures from August as well as this months elephant pictures on Nicole’s Smugmug site but here are some of our favorites: