Eleanor's Baby Book

Yep, Eleanor has a baby book. She was our first child, of course she has a baby book! It isn't the traditional "first word, first step" type of book but it is overflowing with her baby pictures. And just like you'd expect, Eleanor has one and Franklin doesn't…because he was the second child. Of course we took pictures of him, many many pictures, but just never got around to putting them in a book.

We have a shelf of all our photo albums and Hannah enjoys leafing through them occasionally. She went through a big phase of looking at these books and we'd look at baby Eleanor pictures almost daily. But, since moving to this house, the albums are in a different spot and she either doesn't remember they're there or doesn't want to look at them as often. Although last night, while I was upstairs putting Eliza to bed she pulled out Eleanor's album. I don't think I would have been able to make it through the book with her, so I'm glad that it was Lance showing her the pictures this time. Just hearing him tell me that they had done that, brought tears to my eyes and made me remember how much fun we had with her when she was young and spry. Baby Eleanor was beautiful, everyone said so.

There are pictures detailing her every milestone. Her first blankie, her first chew toy, her first bath, her first walk…we were obviously proud parents. We even have her school graduation certificates, she was our genius. Lance was the one to take her to all of her classes and work with her on training, and so their bond was tighter. I was of course her mommy, but she was Daddy's girl for sure. I used to have to repeat my requests to her at least a couple times, but Lance would say, "sit" and her ass would hit the floor before he even finished speaking the word! As she got older and more set in her ways I would just ask Lance to tell her to sit. I didn't even bother trying because she would just give me that look of, "I don't wanna…make me." But when Lance wasn't here and it was just us girls during the day, she paid attention to me just fine. One of her funny quirks I guess :)

I still can't get over the amount of food I've been throwing away lately…its just crazy. I feel like I need to be scraping our plates outside for random squirrels or something. I never thought I gave her that many table scraps during the day, but apparently I did. Everything Hannah half-eats would have been offered to Eleanor to finish. It's hard to say what I miss most with Eleanor being gone, I think of her so often throughout the day. I do know that I really really miss her welcoming us home. Whether we'd been gone for 5 minutes or 5 hours, she'd greet us like it had been days. I miss the wagging tail and the kisses. She also had this un-canny ability to hear Lance pulling in the drive. No matter what car he was driving or what time of day it was, she knew when it was him and she would stop what she was doing to go wait by the door.