One of the Boys

Recently, Ellie has had lots of opportunity to play with cousins. Some of the out-of-town cousins came to stay with Grandma, and all the local cousins joined in on the fun.


On this side of the family, Ellie is the first girl cousin to come along in about a decade, so she runs with a pretty rough crowd.


She keeps up pretty well, usually, and sported a pretty good shiner to prove it. (To be fair, the black eye didn't come from one of the boys, but rather an unfortunate encounter with the fireplace--but it did lend her some pretty good street cred.)

(this isn't the best shot of just how bad the eye looked, but it took more than a week to disappear)

She absolutely loved having the boys around. I thought she might be a little frazzled and want her space back after a day or two, but she was so excited to find them still around every morning. They were great playmates and gave plenty of excuses to play outside. While the older boys would jump on the trampoline, she would watch from the porch, feet planted but leaning forward, yelling at them across the yard for all she was worth, "Yeah! . . . Yeah! . . . YEAH!" and loving every minute of it. She walked completely unfazed through pillow fights and wrestling matches and seemed to just be satisfied to having something like peers around.

That's not to say the boys didn't spoil her with attention and a bit of adoration, which she ate up.




Jared has always had an especially soft spot for Ellie and is a pretty good big brother to her.

Then there is Tommy. He's only about 2.5 months younger than Ellie, but she has decided that he is a "baby!" and proclaims him as such every time she sees him. Her voice gets even higher in pitch when she sees and tries to talk to him, trying to make little baby sounds I guess. This picture is a little dated, but captures their relationship pretty well. Tommy has no clue what this other kid is doing, Ellie is falling all over him (literally), trying to play mother hen.


Tommy hasn't had as much practice with stairs as Ellie (hence the gates) but got pretty good at going up during his last visit. Both babies need all four limbs to climb the stairs, but Ellie would always go behind Tommy and reach up to give him a little "boost" when the got close to the top.

Every once in a while, though, she would decide he wasn't too much of a baby to make him an unwitting partner in crime.




All in all, I think Ellie had a great time and has fond memories of her cousins' visits. Their influence has been pretty strong. She pushes big, plastic tractors around on the floor and calls out, "choo-choo!" and has grown quite attached to a small, yellow monster truck with the words "Maddog II 454" printed on the side, which she calls, "Droom-droom" (the v-r combination of "vroom" is hard for her to say). She often insists that Droom-droom accompany her to the crib for nap time, and I will confess that it made it into the diaper bag for church on Sunday. And this is one of Ellie's favorite seats when it's time to watch a show.


We don't watch so many shows about trains now that the boys are gone. But I think Ellie has rubbed off on the boys a bit too. When I just wasn't up for yet another viewing of The Polar Express (trains), I suggested Cinderella because "Ellie hasn't ever seen it." Not sure how much longer I can play that card with these boys, but they did concede that the mice were pretty funny.