Happy Easter!

We had a busy but fun weekend. Aunt Carissa came to town on Thursday morning. Yay! Thursday afternoon Ellie and I joined my mom and two sisters (Zoe and Carissa) and we went up to Asheville to visit Jesse, Mike and Vera. We had a great time and the cousins played and played and played. We are so excited that a third little girl cousin will be here soon! Ellie loved all of the different toys and Vera was such a great sharer of her things! Ellie especially liked her sand box and her kitchen. We came back late Friday night and Ellie slept the whole way home.

Saturday we took it pretty easy around the house and tried to catch up on laundry and cleaning up etc. I don't think I've mentioned it but we are pretty sure that we are going to put our house on the market in the near future. We are quickly feeling that we need a little more space for 2 dogs and a baby! Unfortunately that means we have a lot of things that we need to get done!

Sunday morning Ellie had her own little Easter Egg Hunt in the front yard. She had a great time. She eventually decided to sit down and point at what she wanted and see if she could get us to deliver the eggs to her! Funny girl! She got the Duplo farm animals in her Easter Eggs and also loved the silly little spinny-egg light up toy. Fun times!


Carissa goes home tomorrow. :( We will miss her as always. She taught Ellie how to nod Yes and No. It is very cute. And she rarely makes a mistake...we're impressed. Not sure if we'll be thanking Carissa next week for the "no nod"! We'll see...

15 Months Old!

Exciting things are happening in our house! Ellie is so busy and so fun and so exhausting. She walks like a pro! I think for awhile she didn't really know that she knew how to walk and so would only walk if she "forgot" Apparently this weekend she realized her abilities and now only resorts to crawling in extreme situations. We love that often she just stands and pats her tummy and then waddles off in her new independence.

It is amazing how smart Ellie is and how fast she acquires new things. I didn't realize before I had a toddler how much they comprehend. One of her newest tricks is pointing out your ears. She quickly jabs you in one and then whips your chin around to get to the other. So funny! She has known nose for a long time but hasn't yet discovered that she herself has these body parts. I'm sure that will be coming soon. She can point out every nose in her books...the rabbit's nose, the llama's nose, the bird's nose (beak :)... She is also picking up a few words. Still many are indistinguishable and I think "ba" stands for a lot of things. It is nice that she signs "more" and "all done" so we for sure know what she means when she uses those. She can point to Daddy and knows the difference between Missy and Milo (hilarious I think) but I really don't think she knows Momma yet. Ha! I'm making Jason talk about Momma more so hopefully she'll pick that one up for me :) She also gives kisses. So sweet and slobbery!!! She opens her mouth all the way up and slobbers your face if you ask her for kisses. She is still a big time waver and is quite friendly to most strangers. She waves at people as we walk by, she waves at old men in cars driving by, she waves at animals and will always wave at other little kids. She gets a lot of attention for her waving!

We love that Ellie is so happy and giggly all the time. I don't know if it is normal but her little toddler feet get really sweaty. It is a little gross in that adorable little toddler feet way but we started probably a bad thing by pretending to smell her "stinky feet" She laughs uncontrollably. We're pretty sure we started a bad thing because now she smells her own feet and laughs or will even smell ours and laugh. Oh my goodness...


Elle has a little tunnel that Grandma brought over and she has been playing in there a lot lately. She even crawls in if she needs to hide something from us. Sneaky, sneaky. She went in the middle and pulled out all of her baby wipes one day!


Ellie has some pretty good dancing moves. She loves daddy's music and prefers it a little bit on the loud side. It is so funny. She moves her whole little body and has pretty good rhythm. (I don't know who she got that from) We've recently started to work on adding the arms into the dance moves. Maybe we'll add a few steps next. So far it is mostly a "bounce" dance.

One of Ellie's favorite activities is drawing with a pen (I did not condone this activity) but she loves to do what everyone else does and is surprisingly good at drawing with a pen. I got her some crayons and she is not so into them. Well she likes to eat them, a lot! She also loves to get "messages"- we draw pictures on sticky notes and she sticks them on the window. She recently got some easter window stickers and loves to play with them! She loves to be outside and so we have really enjoyed the first bit of spring and the beautiful weather. She sits on the front porch and watches for the cars, or squirrels, or whatever happens to pass by. She gets especially excited if someone pulls up to see her! Wagon rides have become one of her favorite things and she loves to pick up the prickly gumballs. She only holds them by the stem which I think is pretty cool.


Ellie's favorite foods this month are cheerios, whole wheat pancakes, blueberries, avocado, green beans, cheese, mac n' cheese, cheesy goldfish crackers (Are you seeing a theme....) She is just starting to try to feed herself with the spoon. It is pretty cute to watch her. She isn't quite coordinated to get the food and make it all they way to her mouth so she picks up the food, puts it on the spoon and tries to get it into her mouth. Often it rolls off and she tries again or just eats it with her fingers. Fun times.

We are having so much fun and Ellie is growing up to be quite an amazing little person. We're pretty happy that she still takes time out of her busy schedule to be sweet and cuddly.

She Walks!

We have exciting news--- Eleanor took her first steps tonight!!! She walked as many as 4 or 5 steps at a time until she was exhausted with excitement with her new skill. She was almost too excited at times, which made her stagger and fall. So cute!

Snow Days!!!

We had a great time in the snow...a rarity in North Carolina! We woke up Saturday morning to about 6 inches of snow. Ellie wasn't sure about why everything looked so different and stood at the window and soaked it all in. She was at first not thrilled about getting all suited up in her snow suit and boots. Luckily we happened across a sled at Ace Hardware in the mad rush to the store to get supplies on Friday, so we were prepared.


We pulled Ellie all around our street and she enjoyed it. I think she was pretty confused about the whole situation but cooperated with our silly activities. We took a couple of pictures and sent one into the local news station. Within about 5 minutes she was on the front page of their website! It was cool- we told her she was famous and a bunch of our friends called asking "is that Ellie?"

The roads were still pretty iffy on Monday morning so I stayed home with Eleanor. Jason worked from home and we spent a lot of time playing in her room. Tuesday life returned to normal and I went back to work on a two-hour delay. Eleanor was super happy to see her Grandma and her usual routine restored.

I was sad to see our little mini-snow vacation end. We got a lot done around the house and had fun spending time together but were all a little stir-crazy by the end!

Busy, busy, busy

There is only one word for living with a one year old! Busy!

Eleanor is so busy. So far walking is constrained to the limits of holding on to a finger or couch/table/baby gate/wall/(insert item here) but she can get around! We had to take down her "office" yesterday because she is totally done with being enclosed in a little area! She would pull herself up shake the gate and demand out. So we have taken down the gates and put her toys in baskets on the diaper table shelves. We moved her new garden activity center over to the other side of the room. The coffee table has a couple of book and toy bins as well as her drum full of musical instruments.

Elle's favorite activities this week: taking her animal magnets off of the fridge (Thanks Mike, Jesse, and Vera!!!) and putting them back on. When she gets them to stick she says one of her new words Yeeaay! and often claps.

It is too cute. Don't you think? She is also loving "discovering" toys in boxes. We can put anything into any box and it keeps her entertained for a good long while. She finds the toy, hides the toy, finds the toy, hides it, lets us find it, etc. So fun!

Sorry for the mass upload of posts tonight...I've had a bunch almost done that needed to be posted so happy to finally get it done. I also updated the links to the pictures on the upper left hand corner so you can check out life as a one year old!

Doctor's Visits...

We've had a little bit of a rough start to 2010. Ellie came down with an ear infection the day after her first birthday. She woke up in the middle of the night absolutely screaming (which is very out of character!) and we knew something was wrong. We took the doctor who confirmed she had a nasty double ear infection and prescribed 10 days of the pink stuff. Luckily for us, Ellie loved the antibiotics and seemed to get better pretty fast.

Ellie went for her one year check-up on January 8th. She was 20 pounds 12 ounces (40th percentile) and 28 inches (20th percentile) and her head circumference was 75th percentile! She did pretty well although she was super shy and very mad that she had to have 2 shots. She didn't mind the finger prick so much and I think was more upset with the whole "stranger anxiety" thing than the actual needles. The doctor was sweet though and warned me that the 15 month appointment is usually the hardest on all parties involved and so to mentally prepare myself :) He did check her ears again and said that the right one still had some fluid in it and to watch in case it didn't clear up and got infected again. Other than that he said she looked great and gave us the OK to start whole milk!

Over MLK weekend Elle started acting like she didn't feel good again. She was just super clingy, not willing to sleep in her crib, and overall really fussy. She started pulling on her ear again and we knew the evil ear infection was back. We took her back into the doctor today and they gave her another round of stronger antibiotics with hopes that this will clear it up. We'll go back to the doctor at the end of this round to see how the ears look.

Ear infections are a real bummer. Must be super painful because Elle is a tough cookie and this has just completely knocked her off her feet. Unfortunately the worst time seems to be night because I guess it hurts more when she lays down. Lets just say...we've watched a lot of late-night cartoons together.

Eleanor's First Birthday Party

Ellie had a fun filled fish-themed first birthday party! She did get a cute little goldfish for her birthday (we're taking name suggestions...)

I was super proud of my cake decorating skills (thanks to help from my mom and my time at good old BRDD) We made a big fish cake and a little fishy for Ellie to go with it.

We also had Swedish Fish cupcakes and gummy worms and goldfish crackers served in goldfish bowls. I really wanted to use a net to serve them but Jason vetoed my idea, deeming it to gross.

Ellie had a great time, showing off her new cruising skills (she is still holding on to cruise) and playing with her friends. She loved her happy birthday song and it was so cool to have so many people singing to her! Thanks so much to everyone for making it her special day. She also got a ton of new toys, clothes, and books. She is one lucky girl!