Updating in Illinois

I thought I'd put a few recent pictures up from our time in Illinois.  Elena still likes to play with beards and honk noses and Papa is being such a good sport.  We have been spending a lot of time reading books which is great since the weather has been very stormy and humid.  I'm not sure when it happened but I now enjoy 10 inches of rain over a year not in one week.  The rest of our waking time is spent chasing her around the house.  Elena loves Grandma and Papa's new house, so big and open she can take off running.  She's walking great but still falls quite a bit (generally because she's trying to run too soon).  And as you saw in a previous post, she's climbing on anything she can get her leg on.  Elena's conversational skills are coming along too.  She understands quite a bit of what we say and imitates our sounds.  She talks back to us in a mixture of sounds like "a-da" for all done or "da" for done or yes and of course she knows Dada and is saying Mama more often.  She is also beginning to assert her opinion more often in the form of tantrums...{sigh}.