ee-LIE-ess happenings

Elias is crawling now. He suprised us about a week ago by suddenly, one evening before bed time, showing that he could not just creep (a form of locomotion most unfortunately involving the face), but "walk" his hands as he moved forward with his body raised. I had been wondering how long it would take for him to figure this skill out, because it is quite a dramatic change from creeping, requiring the ability to balance with one hand planted on the floor while the other makes its move. But now he makes it look quite easy, when he decides to do it, and even makes quite exagerrated arm movements, lifting the hand a good six inches off the ground with each "arm step".

His first tooth is getting more pronounced now, and for the first time it really hurt when he bit my finger last night. Amy claims if your keep the pad of the finger towards the tooth it doesn't hurt, but I am "twice shy" now, as they say.

We have also settled on how to pronounce our son's name. Excellent. Good thing we figured that out before he turns six months, eh? ee-LIE-ess. Sometimes we have said eh-LIE-ess or even uh-LIE-ess, but those seem wrong, especially since the first E is definitely long in the shortened Eli. And we are thinking of favoring the long version day-to-day, since there seems to be a lot of Elijah's popping up. We'll see how that goes. I still have a tendency to use Boo-Boo.

Factoid: Elias was the 452nd most common male name in the U. S. 1990 census, and Williams was the 3rd most common last name.