Our Little Monster

Ellen is close to her second birthday, but I feel like she's been a 2-year old for a while now. She runs around claiming everything is "mine." Makes it fun when it's something that she shouldn't even have. She's figured out which drawers are the fun ones to get into (even child-proofing doesn't work because she'll stick her fingers in a pull out what she can grab--- I don't think we have a complete set of measuring spoons right now). But, she keeps us on our toes, and the good FAR out weighs the bad.

Summer has flown by. School starts at the end of the month and so I thought I'd update with the big things that we've been doing. Ellen took swim lessons, which were fun. She grew to love them and we've been back once since then, but I plan on going back a couple more times during the summer. It's hard because she naps during the open swim time at the community pool, so we go on the days that she takes a short/early nap.

Here she is when we got her swim suit and new flip flops. Ellen is really into dress up and loves new things, so she couldn't wait to try them on. Hence, the clothes underneath the suit.

Ellen hated two things during swim lessons. 1. Laying on her back. She HATED every trick I tried, so we went through those positions quickly. 2. Sticking anything above her chin into the water. She stuck her nose in once, but she just never warmed up to that.

Besides the house projects I've been working on, we did take that trip to the beach. Here's a couple pics from this trip that I forgot to show earlier. This is from her second outting on the beach. The one below is a bad picture that we tried to take of our footprints in the sand. Ellen's foot didn't show up too well and photographing small pits in the sand didn't show up too well... but you can somewhat see what we were going for.

The last thing that we've been doing this summer is art projects. Ellen really loves making messes and so I really have to keep a close eye on her (because it ends up on tables or in her mouth) but she loves it. We've really been playing with a lot of playdoh and markers. The smell of playdoh brings me back to my childhood too, so it's hard not to show off and show Ellen how to properly play with the stuff. Here she is trying to make a ball like Daddy just did.

And, I think the thing that I've spent most of my time with this summer is cleaning Ellen (and her eatting space) after she eats. I didn't know a dab of ketchup could spread this far... she coats herself in it and then rubs food against her cheeks to get some of it onto her food. Sometimes I'll be putting her down to bed and discover food from breakfast. I'm getting better at finding it, but sometimes some stuff sneaks by.

It's too hot...

That's all I have to say...

Hopefully it's not 110 F (43.3 C) where you are!

Summer

Ellen had her first trip to the Oregon Coast this last week. We took her to te Newport Aquarium and then spent a couple of days in Lincoln City after that. She was really interested in the "strangewater" fish that's their current exhibit. It's a bunch of weird looking fish and she had a lot of fun running up to each tank screaming "WOW!"
After the aquarium, we drove to Lincoln city to check into our hotel and then Erika couldn't wait to get her down to the beach to try out her bucket of beach toys. She wasn't too into them at first and wanted to stand around looking at the other beach dwellers...

but she eventually warmed up to the toys and we built a couple piles of sand.

The next day we walked around the beach some more and had fun trying to get Ellen a little bit more interested in everything. It was colder and looked like it was going to rain, so we didn't stay long, but she did have fun running around.

After her nap, we tried to take her into the pool to test how well her future swimming lessons would go. She enjoyed the new clothes.

But not so much the swimming.

She eventually started to enjoy it and swimming lessons this week have been pretty fun. Although it's pretty much "swim around with your kids for the half hour and then we'll sing some songs in a circle." Which would be fine, except I'm the only guy in the group (excluding a couple baby boys) as the two other guys that were going stopped coming because their kids didn't seem to like it.

On the way home we stopped at Tillamook and toured the factory. Really neat to see how they make and package their cheese... but torture because I couldn't have any of the ice cream or cheese that filled the place.

My next summer project: teaching Ellen how to use the potty. I'm just curious who she picked this technique up from....

updated with video

On the ride home from the zoo Ellen had kicked off her shoes and put her socks over her hands. When we got home she didn't want to take her jacket (or her socks) off. So I decided what better opportunity than to catch Ellen dancing around a bit.

I got a minute long video of her dancing around to Raffi's "Baby Beluga" (which isn't loading) and then I guess she was done dancing and got distracted by other things. I switch the cd to the next track and got her dancing a little bit more... if only for a second to get me to stop bugging her. This is the softer side of her "2-year-old" behavior I mentioned earlier.

Our little "2-year-old"

We got a note from day care saying that Ellen is definitely an almost "2-year-old." Guess she's started ignoring them and doing her own thing. I can't decide if she's been sick or teething, but she hasn't been sleeping well and has been extremely moody. I'm hoping that it's sickness and that she'll be back to her non-moody self soon... because the thought of dealing with a "2-year-old" 4 months early is not appealing to me. But, she's been a lot of fun in between the breakdowns. She even figured out that it's fun to stand outside of the sliding glass door and make faces at Daddy and Mommy. We decided to break down and buy a zoo for two membership today. We met George and Bernadette and Eric and Brenda at the zoo this afternoon and thought it would be better to put the $20 ticket purchase towards the year long passes instead. Now it'll give Ellen and I something to do during the summer inbetween the swimming lessons. We forgot to bring the camera, but on the last post Erika shared a picture of Ellen walking around with Grandma's giant pink stuffed bunny, so here's a picture of her discovering that bunny. Imagine this face when she saw the elephant and the leopard and you'd be close to how fun it was at the zoo.

Happy Easter!

It's my favorite holiday and we did all sorts of things to celebrate. Friday we made sugar cookies. I rarely make sugar cookies, and when I do, I remember why I do it so rarely. I hate all the flour and rolling and sticking... my cookies came out looking more like squiggle lines and circles than chicks and eggs. Ellen had fun with the cookie cutter until she figured out that raw cookie dough is delicious, and I had visions of salmonila poisening and made her stop. It was a looooong 10 minutes before that first batch of cookies were done.

She had a much better time with the sprinkles. I had a lot of fun cleaning them up afterward...

Saturday we dyed Easter eggs. This was a great activity for Ellen!

Sunday morning finally came, and Ellen was a lot more interested in her Easter basket than breakfast....

She had lots of fun with all the empty eggs. I'm mean and only filled 2 eggs with a couple jelly beans.

Then we finally put on the pretty new dress. It is still really hard to get a normal picture of Ellen, but we managed to get this one of her stricking a pose.

She did NOT want to leave her new eggs for church, but we finally got out of the house.

And we made it to grandma and grandpa's for ham....where Ellen found grandma's giant pink bunny. So glad we got to leave this at grandma's.

New Neice and other stuff

We have another new niece! Amelia is such a cutie!

Our little one is learning something new all the time. Here's her new naptime routine (that's a sock in her mouth):

She gets too worked up sometimes and has to take a quiet break:

And she loves brushing my hair: