Ellie's New House: A Guided Tour

About a month before we moved, I printed out a picture of the house we were going to rent and told Ellie this was her new house. She asked every day if we could go see "Ellie's new house." She still calls it that, even though we've been here for almost four weeks now. I don't know what we will call the next place we move into.

We are really enjoying our house, living in walking distance to the park, the library, the farmers' market, and church. We hardly drive anywhere. The house itself has been great too. A kitchen big enough to house all of Brady's culinary projects, and no stairs to worry about for Charlie.

Ellie has discovered some of the finer features of the house:


This is her "Harry Potter closet." It is the bottom linen cupboard in one of the bathrooms where I decided to keep some big quilts and extra pillows. Ellie thought it was great that I put a little bed in there for her. (It's also a good place to practice her baby balancing skills.) Someday she's going to read Harry Potter and not get why it was so mean that he was forced to sleep in a little cupboard under the stairs.


The counter tops are set just right to make a nice blanket fort. And if you dump out the toy box first, you can move some furniture in.


The oven door doesn't have a window, which Brady doesn't love, but Ellie thinks it makes for a great full-length mirror. She is always running up to it and making faces or dancing. Here she is being either a princess or "all married" and riding on her doggie, "Bullseye."


Ellie's performance continues with her "guys" on the stage in the living room.


Ellie always loved playing on the bunkbeds at her cousins' house and was delighted to find we had some in our own dining room.


She really wanted Charlie to get in the bunkbed with her. Careful what you wish for kiddo, you just may get it someday.


Probably her favorite place in the house, though, is "the club." This cupboard has three doors to it, and I knew it would be too difficult to monitor, too much temptation. So we just left it empty. Ellie calls it "the club," and loves to play in there, pretend to sleep in there, finish her lunch in there, you name it.




She doesn't mind that it's dark when all the doors are closed. It reminds me of Silas Marner when Eppie plays in the coal hole where she had been sent for punishment. Guess I can't use "the club" as a timeout corner.

I'd say Ellie likes her new house pretty well. She's been having a rough time settling into this move. You'll notice that she's in pajamas in most of these pictures. It's not that I took them all the same day, or all right before bedtime. She just really wants to be in her pajamas all the time. It's kind of her comfort/control thing right now. We really turned her world upside down uprooting her and bring her here. She misses having her cousins and aunts and uncles around all the time, and especially her grandparents. (Yesterday she was trying to talk me into turning on a show for her, and when I told her no, she said maybe Charlie could do it, or Grandma could. I reminded her Grandma wasn't here and then she wailed, "Grandpa isn't home too!")

Thanks to Skype and plenty of adventures here, though, I think she is starting settle and enjoy it here too.

 

Nine Months

Seriously, Mom. We have to do this every month?


Oh, look. You have car keys.


Like I'm really going to sit still for that.


Yes, folks. We have a crawler. Charlie was really working on this before the move, but really took off after we got here. Let me tell ya, if any of you have reluctant crawlers out there, a DVD player set up close to the ground is a real motivator.


It's also a real bruiser. (Don't worry, Grandpa, this faded completely the same day. He's fine.)


But bruising is good for his street cred. His latest nickname is "Charlie Davidson." It's hard to capture in a picture, but whenever we put Charlie in his chair to eat, his hands are always in motion like he's revving a motorcycle. (It helps if you imagine Ellie sitting next to him humming while she eats.)


Pretty fearsome, huh?

Charlie has really been developing more and more lately. Every day seems to be a new trick. In addition to crawling, some of the highlights include clapping, giving "five," all kinds of gargling and spitting (hard to explain to Ellie that she can't do this outside of brushing her teeth when Charlie does it everywhere), and lots of new jabbering sounds that are starting to have more consistent meaning (for when he wants Mom or Dad).




He also learned to pull himself up to standing recently (which sometimes makes falling asleep at naptime a little harder--argh!). He loves to watch cars drive by and just smile and make little happy sounds to them (by comparison, Ellie liked to sit out on the balcony and holler after the cars in Knoxville).  (p.s. These pictures kept loading sideways. He really is standing up. I don't know why Google couldn't load them right. I tried.)


He gives the best bear hugs ever. He will squeeze and burrow his head in, come up and check to see your face, and then burrow back in. I told Brady that one of the best parts of my day is sitting in the rocking chair with him at bedtime, singing lullabies, feeling his arms on my neck. One of the worst times of my day is putting him in the crib and hear his dramatic crying, weeping if you will, as I walk across the room to the door. The thing is, most nights he stops as soon as I close the door and he goes right to sleep. It's like he feels like he just has to put up the effort still. He's had a pretty good instructor in the baby bedtime theatrics.


But he is pretty irresistible, and he knows it. Like any baby, he has his fussy and cranky moments, but he's usually a pretty happy kid, and we're pretty happy to have him.

(We're still working on getting settled in after the move, so I'll give you more of the update on that later, but I wanted to get a good Charlie post up for all his adoring fans.)

Cowgirl Princess vs. Monkey Dragon: False Dichotomy

You know life is pretty intense when you need to wear a hard hat to your backyard tea parties.




And you can't be too careful when it comes to eating breakfast cereal.



Ellie is pretty into accessories lately. She insisted on that bike helmet all day once. Sometimes I consider putting it on her at the playground because I know she would love to wear it and she is a bit of a daredevil.

Sometimes Brady and I watch this kid at play and just marvel at her little personality. Who would have guessed when we brought our little Elizabeth home over two and a half years ago, we'd end up with this funny, smart, drive-us-up-the-wall, amazing little Ellie Belly.

What has struck me lately is the full range her personality encompasses. She can be totally laid back and go with the flow, or a complete drama queen at times. One time she was getting into mischief, so, trying to give her a warning count to three for the pending time-out that was approaching, I offered a menacing, "ONE!" to which Ellie quickly responded, chanting, "2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 [then singing] pirate girls, pirate girls, PI-RATE GIRLS NINE!" (She's a big fan of They Might be Giants.) Apparently I don't do menacing very well. She is getting better at counting though, so that's a plus. Often when she asks for chips or crackers or something, she requests not a specific number, but "too many" as a set quantity.

Other times when discipline is in order, say when she has already had "too many" crackers and I put them away, she might completely lose it, melt into sobs and plead, "No, Mama, don't DO this. Please, Mama. Please!" The begging and the tears are fierce; you'd think she were auditioning for role of "neglected child whose mother never feeds her #3." She's good. She is getting better at controlling her emotions and working problem-solving more recently. A few days ago when she got into a bag of tortilla chips that got left out on the counter, rather than her usual melodrama when I closed it, she stayed calm and sweetly asked, "Um, Mama, you wanna go upstairs with Charlie and check if little Charlie wants a bottle upstairs Mama? Go upstairs, Mama?" (then innocently bats her eyelashes). Nice try, kiddo.

Sometimes Ellie is very interested in what she's wearing and how her hair looks. She will take a brush and move it in circular motions on top of her head (tangling her hair worse) and declare, "I'm pretty! I'm so pretty!"

(My sister Mindy took these pictures--it was Ellie's "pruple" outfit photo shoot. To get her to keep that bow in her hair I kept telling her, "Mimi wants it in, Mimi wants it in." That trick worked for about 2 weeks after Mindy left town. Apparently she has more authority with Ellie than I do. Now Ellie is all about wearing her flowers in her hair.)

Other times, she couldn't care less about staying neat and pretty and loves nothing more than to sit in and dig in the dirt. Going for walks is a slow process with Ellie because we have to stop and pick up every pine cone or rock that looks interesting. Mud is a fascination for her. We have to work constantly to keep her out of the garden when she's not supposed to be in there. A lot of the time she will go back there to sneak mint leaves. She loves them. But lately as the tomatoes have started to ripen, she is picking and eating all of them too. First it was just the cherry tomatoes. But now she will come walking out of the garden with a baseball-sized tomato, chomping it like she would an apple. None of us has a shot at a fresh garden tomato unless we keep Ellie penned up for a while.


Ellie has hit that almost inevitable stage for little girls of becoming enamored with princesses and fairies and the like. She hasn't gotten too invested in any particular character or mindset of what a princess is, exactly. Just that wrapping a blanket around herself apparently turns her into a princess sometimes. She does the same thing to be "married," except the blanket goes over her head. She saw some of our wedding pictures, so we told her about when we got married. We drove past the temple and told her that's where we got married. She stated matter-of-factly, "I gotta jump out and get all married berry quick." So now she plays married. She hunches over to keep the blanket on and talks in a creeky voice, "I'm maaaarried." Apparently marriage just turns you into an old woman.

I think a lot of what has kept Ellie so grounded from becoming completely obsessed with princesses (so far) is this crew.

This is Ellie's usual posse. She is very much one of the boys around here, surrounded by so many boy cousins to play with. She adores each and every one of them too. And she loves to play trains, cars, and any rough and tumble game they come up with. She's game for just about anything, and wants to try whatever the older boys are doing.

At the same time, she can be rather girly. One night when the cousins were getting ready to head home, Ellie was hiding in the storage ottoman. Just as they were going out the door, she jumped out and cooed, "Oh, boooyyys! Come back and kiss me!" I think we'll have to keep an eye on this one . . .

Well, sorry for the overly long post. I've had a backlog of pictures and stories that I needed to catch up on before the move and before we take too many more pictures. When Ellie was tiny everyone kept giving us the advice, "enjoy it now," I guess meaning that she won't stay little for long and to cherish the moments. It's pretty hard not to enjoy at least some part of a day with Ellie. She can stretch us and wear us out, but what she has to give, she gives in abundance. When I was having a rough day recently, she didn't know the words to use to comfort me, so just brought me a blanket and put it on my lap. And then another. And another. Then she piled pillows on top of that. It was what she knew how to do, and she wanted me to feel better. Then she climbed on top of the pile on my lap and asked, "You want a hug, Little Mama?" (sometimes she calls me that). About made me cry. Sometimes Ellie is just the best.

Facebook meets the Blog: A month in review

A friend of mine gave me this idea for a blog post: copy your last month's worth of Facebook status updates, paste, and viola--automatic journal entry. So here is roughly the last month of everything I've posted on my Facebook wall. I thought about including the comments others put on there, but then figured they didn't sign up for this, so you'll just have to imagine my witty friends' and family members' retorts. First, a picture:

(Yeah, wish I'd had that one while I was teaching college research papers.)

Naptime today has been more like a rousing game of whack-a-mole. (I promise no kids were whacked, but I am exhausted after the whole process and need a nap now too.)

Had a hula hoop contest with my 4- and 6-year-old nephews today, sans hula hoops. I won. I rank this accomplishment somewhere between perfecting grilled cheese sandwiches and earning a master's degree. I have some wicked awesome fake hula hooping skills.

hulu keeps telling me to use bing as a search engine so I can make my web searches social. What a terrible idea! My searches are not nearly as glamorous as that commercial. My latest search engine search? "How to kill giant fruit flies." Did you all really want to go on that journey with me?

After conducting a *very* scientific experiment, I have discovered that you actually catch more flies with vinegar than with honey. Next up: I'm going to put a bunch of frogs in a pot and slowly raise the temp. to see if they will boil.

As if there were ever any doubt whose daughter Ellie (2.5) really is, last night she offered up her first pun. I asked her how her ice cream tasted and she said, "Mmm, it's de-LICK-table, Mommy." All yours, Brady.

I saw that Sam Waterson is in a new TV drama. I think his eyebrows should get separate billing.

It can get pretty tiring chasing after these kids all day; sometimes I start to wonder why I'm doing all this. Then I see my two-year-old practically empty the dishwasher by herself--and put stuff away in the right place when she can reach--and it all starts to make sense. Next I'm going to see if she's tall enough to push the vacuum cleaner yet . . .

If I ever have to enter into contract negotiations, I am sending a two-year-old in as my rep. They are naturals when it comes to negotiating; "Okay, okay, you can have a 5% raise AND watch Toy Story Three--just eat your carrots! And if you pick up your toys, we'll throw in dental."

Ellie was uninterested in vitamins until we got her some that are teddy bears that she can play with/talk to/make dance and walk before she eats them. She wouldn't eat her dinner until I made a face out of the different items, and then she was delighted with it. It's like the more human her food gets, the more likely she is to eat it. Anyone else find this alarming?

Well, that was a bit disappointing. That's it. Turns out I'm not very active on Facebook. I even went back farther than a month to get that Hulk picture (I thought it worth preserving for posterity). I doubt I will go through this exercise again. It turns out I don't narrate enough of my life on Facebook. I know that's where most people tend to upload pictures and update their goings-on to loved ones these days, but I don't trust Facebook enough with my life, I guess. It's too fleeting. Once a statement or picture is out of your newsfeed, it's gone. I don't think people are going to go through my Facebook writings when I'm long gone (unless Facebook re-nigs on all their privacy settings for more "market research"). Blogs might not be as technologically trendy, but they are forever, right? Especially if Google takes over the world, as I imagine they will within the next 30 years or so.

And, since this is what most of you come looking for, here is a cute picture of the kids.


I like to keep them contained.

8 months

Sunday Charlie turned 8 months old. He wasn't feeling super great about it. (Whenever we put this shirt on Charlie, Ellie says, "Charlie's wearing Daddy's shirt!")

Just last weekend we were telling everybody how Charlie is just the happiest baby lately, so smiley and easy to laugh, laid back. Then he spent the last week proving us wrong. We think it's another round of teething, but we've thought before and been wrong. I think you can only be 100% sure it's teething in retrospect. Either way, this kid hasn't been feeling too hot this week.

He's getting better at sitting up, though it's not something he does unsupervised yet.


He's also making efforts at crawling (gulp!). I tried to get some pictures of him up on all fours, but I never quite got the right shot. Most of his mobility right now is limited to rolling aimlessly, or getting up ready to crawl, then collapsing and scooting himself unintentionally backwards.


He puts up a brave front, in spite of his teething pain. He is still a lot of fun. I'm not sure, but I think he is a funny kid. Like he will babble on and on for a while, stop all of a sudden and just burst out laughing. I think he's telling jokes. I don't understand the punchlines, but those of you with babies might try out, "Bah-BAH dah-dah-dah-DAH!" It just kills around here.


He's earned a few nicknames over the last little while: "Chewy" (as some of you might remember from this post), "Gus-Gus" because sometimes when he jabbers he sounds like that mouse from Cinderella, and "Old Yeller" because he has got quite a set of lungs and really bellows at times when he gets talking (not upset, just LOUD). He's showing more and more personality all the time. We love it.


Ellie is enjoying more time with Charlie too. She always asks to hold him, which is funny because sitting on her lap he is nearly as big as she is. But she insists. She also wants him to join her "in" whatever she's in (Ellie loves to climb inside anything--boxes, forts, Charlie's bed . . .) I found her trying to pull Charlie by his head into her "princess" tunnel from Brady's mom (It attaches to her "Cars" fort). I thought it best if I assist.


I think Charlie appreciated that.


For a while. While they were playing in there Ellie told me, "Mommy, this is my dream with Charlie." So glad we could make your dreams come true, kiddo.


Charlie is getting more excited about books lately too.

I told Ellie she could read to him, but he wasn't quite as interested in such a big, non-board book. This is one we got from a friend in Tennessee. It's called Sleep, Sleep, Sleep and talks about mothers singling to their little ones around the world in different languages. Ellie will say the different words for "sleep," but then at the end when it says "sleep, sleep, sleep" one last time, I heard her tell Charlie, in a totally serious voice, "hammerpants, hammerpants, hammerpants." Hmmm. I wonder who might have taught her that . . . ?? Might be time to spell Daddy off from Ellie's bedtime routine.


Here is a quick video of Charlie in probably his favorite pastime. This kid loves bouncing. He's really noisy in the exersaucer, but he loves jumping on the bed even more. He usually laughs a lot harder at this, but like I said, he's been having a rough week. Still a great video.


This kid just keeps getting bigger and packing in more and more personality. We are doing our best to keep up with him and are sure glad he's in our family!

Back to the Zoo

For a while now Ellie has been saying we need to go back to the zoo. Not in a super excited, jump-up-and-down sort of way. She has this resigned, tired way of saying it, like it's a huge burden: "Come on, let's go back to the zoo." It's how she "reads" Goodnight Gorilla, which has very few words actually. The part where the zookeeper's wife has to get all the animals who followed him home out and take them back to the zoo. That's how Ellie narrates this part. She squeals, "Goodnight! Goodnight! Goodnight!" for all the animals when the lights go out, and a perplexed, "What?!" and, "Oohh, nooo!" when the zookeeper's wife discovers them. But she is totally resigned, and sounds weary for this woman having to trudge back to the zoo.

Nevertheless, her suggestion persisted. So we decided to take the kids to the zoo on a discount day. We were pretty excited to see everything through a two-year-old's eyes. Have you ever bought someone a present that you just knew was perfect for them and that they were going to absolutely love? It was so perfect that you were just so excited to give it to them? That's how we were about going to the zoo with Ellie. This is going to be so great! And it was sooo . . . fine.

We've experienced this phenomenon before with Ellie. Sometimes we get it right. Wonder Pets for her birthday--nailed it! Little plastic dollhouse for Christmas--she can still entertain herself for hours on end with her "guys" in that thing. Mexican restaurant where they serve fresh chips--because Ellie LOVES tortilla chips--meh.It was a good day, but  not quite the magic we were anticipating.


Here are a few shots of the day:


Ellie being a ground squirrel (which she called "being Harry Potter" because she remembered a picture of her cousin doing this wearing his new glasses and Brady called him Harry Potter in it, so . . .)


Ellie going on the giraffe slide (where we almost lost her--she's going on a leash next time).


Ellie on the merry-go-round. She had the whole thing to herself, and she chose the chair. See what I mean? Just . . . fine.


She went again and actually rode it that time.


Charlie was as good a sport as ever, putting up with late feedings, a missed nap, and a hot day. He was just happy to be a long for the ride and outside so much. He was really a trooper.

The highlight, as always, was feeding the goats. I took a video again so you (grandparents) can see how much Ellie has progressed this year by not eating the goat food. (Just getting lengths of goat drool all over her hands and then touching her face a lot. Awesome.)


And what we thought would be the highlight: the butterfly garden. For all you fellow Fancy Nancy fans, you'll know how special a butterfly garden is to Ellie. She doesn't call them butterflies--they are "bonjour butterflies."


But then . . . meh.


I thought they were pretty cool.


She did get excited when one landed on Brady's shoulder while he was carrying her.

It was a long day and we wore these kids out.We had quite the nap time when we got home.


All in all, we really did have fun with the kids. We realized that part of the problem (if there was one) is that the whole world is like a zoo for Ellie. So much is still new and unexpected to her; a trip to the bank is still really exciting, running through the sprinklers counts as "swimming," and you go out of your way to find the speed bumps in a parking lot if Ellie is in the car because it is so fun. Walking down the street to see the neighbors' horses or chickens is something we do, but still and adventure. It doesn't seem to out of the realm of normal for her for there to also be a huge giraffe on the other side of the fence. So she enjoyed herself, but she wasn't gawking, amazed, jumping up and down. She took it all in and then was ready for the next animal.

In a way, it might be kind of sad when that all becomes so thrilling for her because that will mean that she doesn't expect the whole world to be exciting and thrilling anymore. It will mean that the rest of the world has become normal, that she won't see adventure in everything she does, that we'll have to seek it out. And someday she will actually be bored with her world, I will have to sigh and say in a tired voice, "Come on, let's go back to the zoo."