A Bit of a Brag-a-Log (in which Ellie says the alphabet)

Not that all blogging isn't really a form of bragging, but lately I think my family has done a bit of achieving worth bragging about.

First up, Brady. Quite a week for him. First, he ran his first half marathon. Here he is coming around the bend to the finish line.

He had some trouble with the tendons in the arch of his foot and ankle the week before the race and was worried he wouldn't be able to do it, but he eased up on the training schedule a bit and was still able to finish feeling great. He got a medal for participating, which I didn't think to get a picture of.

Then, a few days later (Tuesday) he went down to Provo and defended his dissertation. I wasn't able to go with him, so no pictures of this, though I thought he should have worn the half marathon medal to the defense. Turns out he didn't need the medal. The defense went amazingly well and he passed with no revisions of the content (though he did have to make some minor editorial changes here and there, but who cares about that?). In some ways it is hard to believe it's finally over, though he's worked so hard for it, it certainly is easy to believe he would do so well. His committee complimented him on how well-written the document was and how well-prepared he was. I really can't gush enough about how well he did. And it's all over, just in time to graduate. He just has to wrap up some clerkship hours and walk across a stage next month and then everyone has to call him Doctor.

Ellie is a bundle of energy as always and surprises us with new words and tricks every day. Lately she's been pointing out letters she sees on signs, people's T-shirts, or salad dressing bottles. Apparently PBS Kids has been rubbing off on her. I've been trying to catch her doing her letters on the camera for a few weeks now, but she is a hard one to catch in the act--not much of a performer on demand usually. Finally, this morning at breakfast I got her. It took me a second to get the camera going, so we missed 'A.' And for some reason she won't say 'S,' which is weird because that's what she used to call all the letters.



She can count to ten too, but that's even harder to catch since she really doesn't know what she's doing when she's saying the numbers, just kind of absent mindedly rattles them off at random times.

Not to be left out, Baby Brother is as wiggly and active as ever. I'm at 21 weeks along now. I remember reading that at 15 weeks a fetus can flex his fingers into a fist. That seems pretty remarkable to me. In less than a semester's time, he went from being a single cell to being able to bring his hand from a splayed-fingered position to curling it up in a ball. I don't think any of my college students made such advances in a single semester (not that they weren't smart, but c'mon). We're six weeks past that mark now. Who knows what this kid can do? He's probably worked his way up to differential equations by now. Genius.

(p.s. Not sure why this is saying this post is written by Brady. It isn't. He's not bragging about himself.)

An Ellie-ism

The other day Ellie was amusing herself by pointing to and naming the different parts of my face. She started at my mouth and worked her way up to "beeping" my nose. Then continued with, "eyes, eyes, bonk, hair."

It's little wonder that she would call someone's forehead a "bonk." Ellie usually has a few small bruises scattered across her forehead. To Ellie, the world is one big jungle gym. She will climb anything that holds still. She climbs onto chairs so she can climb onto the table. She climb on the piano bench so she can climb onto the piano keyboard. Probably the most oft-repeated phrase around here is, "Ellie, get down!" Here she is climbing up the twisty slide at my brother's house (it was a little slippery from rain earlier that day).


This past weekend I heard my sister helping Ellie with sunscreen saying, "Hold still, we gotta get your bonk now." Apparently the term is sticking.

And here are some recent Ellie pics.


She demands to wear Brady's hat whenever he has it out.


So on the go during our 4th of July festivities that I couldn't get a decent picture of her.


Riding the gondola up the mountain at Sun Valley. This is the way to do hiking if you have a toddler and/or are 20 weeks pregnant.


And riding in her new favorite toy with her cousin Jon. She lives for bike rides with Daddy. And if this whole dissertation defense doesn't go well next week, Brady does have some good practice to be a rickshaw driver.

It's a . . .

Boy! Here are a couple of decent profile shots.

And here's a quick wave he gave to all his adoring fans out there.

This kid is a wiggler. Constant motion during the whole ultrasound. He might just give big sister a run for her money.

Jury is still out on name selection, though we had a better pool of agreed-upon names for boys than for girls, so hopefully we'll settle on something soon. For now, it's nice to be able to tell Ellie about "Baby Brother."

When Mommy has a Migraine . . .

. . . Ellie gets to watch too much TV. This is also the case when Mommy has morning sickness. So, pretty much Ellie watches too much TV every day. The last several weeks I have spent the first part of most days curled up on the couch and doing one of the things I swore I wouldn't do as a parent: letting TV help babysit my child. It's something of a comfort to me that Ellie's attention span isn't long enough to really sit through any television show, so she does quite a bit of playing and ignoring the TV more often than not. She is at such a distractable age, which for the most part is useful. I asked Brady if he thought she could have ADHD, to which he replied, "No, she just has ADH. It doesn't become a disorder until kids are older. Right now it's normal."

I try to console myself, as most parents in this predicament probably do, that the shows we are watching are at least educational. You can't go wrong with PBS Kids, right? On closer inspection, though, I wonder just what she might be learning from it all.

First up is Curious George, which sometimes we miss if we take a while at breakfast and I am secretly happy that we will have one less show to watch that day. But secretly I am also sad because, of the line-up, it's probably my favorite. Ellie adores the Curious George books, and always gets excited to see him. I do find myself commenting now and then that, "That's not what it's like in real life, Ellie. People don't really trust monkeys that much. They're not just going to let them run their store while they take a break, or ask them to feed their farm animals while they are out of town." I do appreciate the sometimes the narrator seems to get how ridiculous the scenarios are and throws in a slightly sarcastic jab. Our most quotable line from an episode after George comes up with some absurd solution to a problem he probably caused: "Thank goodness for monkey brains!" And then later, "Score another one for monkey brains!" I like to picture my four-year-old nephew saying this whenever he gets excited about something.

Next comes The Cat in the Hat. It became slightly less obnoxious to me once I realized the Cat is actually voiced by Martin Short, and not someone who is just trying to sound like him. I think it's pretty great that he would do a show for kids on PBS. An obnoxious show, but still. The premise is that the two kids playing together run into some kind of problem, which they figure out after going on an adventure to visit some animals with the Cat in the Hat (always asking permission from their mothers--a nice touch to this more modern version). Ellie likes that they sing so many songs. I think some of their songs are kind of disturbing. Like when a mother bunny explains to them how they keep themselves from their predator, the fox, by using their senses to detect his presence. As they head out to find food, she sings, "What do we do when we go for a munch?" to which her little bunny children cheerily reply, "Sniff, look, and listen . . . so we don't become lunch!" A bit morbid for my taste.

After this show comes Super Why, which is Ellie's favorite, so we usually try not to miss this one. In this show the Super Readers have to solve "super big" problems (like one of them loses a toy or doesn't know how to tie their shoes) by going into a book and finding how the characters solve a similar problem, uncovering the "super story answer." Seriously, about 25 minutes to figure out that if you can't find something, you should "look for it," or if you can't tie your shoes, you should "learn." In the story the super readers have to help with the problem through use of the alphabet, spelling, rhyming, or reading, which are the parts Ellie really likes. Whenever Alpha Pig has to go through the whole alphabet to find the right letters, Ellie's face lights up. She loves letters. They always ask the viewer questions and Ellie loves to participate and answer back, even though she is almost always 100% wrong. But she really gets into it, so it's fun to watch her watch the show. They might ask something like, "A-B-C-D . . . what comes after D?" And Ellie will respond with a confident, matter-of-fact, "R!" It's one of the shows she will actually sit with me to watch, which she knows means I will let her watch it just to get a chance to cuddle with this constantly on-the-go baby.
So I guess I do like that show okay, except that they completely pillage the whole fairy tale canon and water down every story for the kids. Aesop and the brothers Grimm and Mother Goose would be rolling in their graves if they saw what was happening to their beloved stories. The tortoise and hare finish the race together, with the solution being to simply "enjoy the game," even though Aesop provided a perfectly good moral to the story. Humpty Dumpty uses a slide to get down, so no great fall. And I won't even try to explain what terrible things they did to Rumpelstiltskin. Sure, kids are learning their letters, but at what cultural cost?

Next comes Dinosaur Train. That show is weird, weird, weird. Covered in crazy sauce. Sometimes Ellie starts to cry when it comes on. I don't blame her. We usually turn the TV off at this point and go play a while before her nap. There's only so much sanity you and your child can give up for education's sake.

Announcing

So the word has been out for a while now, but I thought I better get something on the blog for those who may not yet know. Baby #2 is on the way! Due in November again. This time around I have had a lot more trouble with nausea and migraines, but I'm really hoping that the next 2 trimesters treat me better. Here are some really blurry profile pics. I don't know if babies at this age can suck their thumbs yet, but kind of looks like this one is making a good effort in this first picture.

I was going to try to do something with Ellie to announce on the blog, like get a video of her saying something about the baby. Turns out, she is in complete denial right now about all this. Hopefully the next six months will give her time to come to terms with the news. Although, to be fair, the pictures don't exactly look like her idea of a baby.

It would be kind of creepy if when she saw this picture she did think, "Baby!" But we are still excited to meet this new little one next fall!

Easter de Mayo

I've been meaning to do a post for a little while and just haven't gotten around to it. So here are a few belated Easter pictures and other miscellaneous Ellie updates.

Easter weekend was cold. Nice and sunny, but cold. So I opted out of the cute springtime fashion for Ellie and she sported her winter coat for her first Easter egg hunt.


She didn't quite get the idea of it. She picked up two eggs and was content to have something to carry in each hand, so decided she was done and walked away.


Daddy had to bring her back and help her understand the purpose of the basket.


She figured it out, though, and was pretty proud of her half dozen or so.


Then she got home and found out they open. And have candy in them. Eggs were a very serious business that weekend.


We've finally had better weather since then and spend some good time outside every day. Ellie would live outdoors if we let her. Here is the frilly hat portion of the outfit she would have worn had it been warmer on Easter.


It took some convincing to get her to wear it. For several days she wouldn't let me near her with it. But she would wear Brady's hat. He told her she looked "cute" in it. So she would put his hat on and walk around declaring herself, "Cute! I key-yute!" After that, she decided that any hat (or washcloth, or upturned bowl) on her head made her cute. So today I told her this hat would make her cute. She was sold.

Other favorite Ellie-isms of late: "Awesome!" "Giiddyup" (meaning "get up" or "pick me up"), "Crazy," "Okayokayokayokay," "Oh boy!" "Sure," and a pretend phone conversation I overheard, "Hewo? . . . Yeah! . . . what? . . . okay . . . hi! . . . howyadoin'? . . . bye!"

We've been trying to work on "please" and "thank you" for a while now too. Often when Ellie asks for something, the conversation goes something like this:
Me: Say "please?"
Ellie: Okay
Me: No, say "please?"
Ellie: Okay . . . (and so on)
One time she wanted me to take her upstairs, demanding "Up!" I reminded her to say "please," to which she replied, "Up, plea, okay?" (translation: "I've jumped through your hoops, now gimme what I want!")

So that's an update on what's been keeping us busy lately. Ellie is becoming quite the parrot and is pretty funny to talk to. Now if she would just learn to listen a little more when it comes time to clean up . . .

As long as she doesn't figure out that the syrup bottle is a flip-top, we might not be in too bad of shape . . .

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.