A Belated Welcome to the World

This post is long overdue--I mean like long long LONG overdue. It's one of those posts that came with an accompanying project that's just taken me forever to finish! Finally tonight I'm able to give a proper Chatter welcome to our most beautiful and adorable new friend, Elijah Peter! All the way back in May, on May 16 to be exact, we rejoiced with our friends Pat and Kristin about the arrival of this amazingly cute little guy, who actually arrived on the day his dad was supposed to walk down The Hill at graduation. Needless to say, Pat didn't walk in his graduation ceremony because Elijah arrived early that morning and quickly overtook graduation as the most important event of the day. The good part about Eli coming on that particular weekend was that all of his grandparents were already coming for Pat's celebration, so they were all able to see him in the hospital on the day of his birth!

After Eli's extended family vacated Lawrence, Chad and I headed over to Pat and Kristin's to meet the little guy for the first time. I can't even tell you how incredibly perfect and beautiful this little guy is! I seriously could have held him all night, and I most certainly could have taken pictures of him all night!

Speaking of pictures, that's really why this post took forever for me to get finished. When we first went to meet and take pictures of Eli, it was right after I'd taken all those pictures on campus that I later realized I couldn't work with since I couldn't open them in my old Photoshop program. Thankfully my friend Kelly pointed out that I could probably get the faculty/staff discount on the full version of Photoshop (which I did--thanks Kelly!), which is 80% off the regular price! So after a bit more research and some shopping, I picked up the full CS5 program, which contains Photoshop and several other programs!

It took me a couple more weeks to figure out how to maneuver my way around PS and deal with those RAW files, then some more time to download and figure out how out to use the two sets of Pioneer Woman's Photoshop actions (like macros that do a whole bunch of filtering/coloring/changing for you to give you a special effect), and then a few more evenings trying to edit all the pictures that I'd taken of Eli and his parents. Throw in the reunion planning and the two weekends since then that we've been gone, and well, you might actually see why this took me so long to finish!

Enough of my excuses though--it's time to see the most adorable little guy in Lawrence! Here are the pictures, with the original one first and then a second copy with one of PW's actions applied. They have names like "Seventies" and "Old West" and "Boost" and "Colorize" and are pretty cool. Unfortunately I didn't actually make note of which action I was using each time! Also unfortunately, the pictures were in fairly dim artificial light, so the first few weren't so good because I'd forgotten to switch to raw format. Hopefully there are a few in there that are decent though!



Is he not the most precious little thing you've ever seen? I mean seriously, I can hardly stand it. That hair and that angry little brow of his absolutely kill me. He just couldn't be any cuter!

Crazily enough, I had a doll when I was a kid that looked exactly like him, and I actually thought I still had it and was so excited to show Pat and Kristin. Unfortunately though, I think I must have given it away during the move, because I went to look in our stash of toys in the storage room and couldn't find it. Maybe someday a search of the Internets will turn up a picture so I can prove that their son is as perfect as any doll! Congrats my dear friends!

Oh, and for more recent pictures of the little guy, you can follow Eli's adventures on his blog, which he's been keeping since before he was born! ;)