It's that time of year again.

Back to work. The everyday routine kicking back into full gear. Top it off with Ellen posing with a stuffed duck and football season starting up. Fall is here and life is back to normal.

Ellen at 0.

Ellen at 1.

Ellen at 2.

Erika and I were joking while taking this picture that she's really going to hate having to pose with this duck when she's 20. But, darn it, tradition must be maintained...

No!

Like baby, like baby

Ellen's been enjoying the last couple days of summer. She got a baby doll for her birthday and she's been having fun with that. She likes to change the diapers CONSTANTLY. She'll rip open the front of her clothes and try to pry the diaper off, and when that doesn't work she'll carry the baby by the half-ripped off diaper to us and ask for help. But, she's been pretty good with it otherwise...
baby sleeps next to her bed and, as you can see, they have pretty similar sleeping methods...
she also makes sure that baby is properly fed

and walked.

Besides that, Ellen has been getting sooooo much bigger. She climbed up on the couch the other day and was soooo proud of herself for making a seat of pillows to sit on.

And, she's really started to drool a lot while sleeping... she's a little like daddy afterall!

And, we finally took another trip to the zoo recently. She was very excited to leave the house. She even sat still long enough for me to style her hair (which took longer than you might think).

I think she started to fall asleep in the car on the way to the zoo, so when we got there she didn't seem as excited as she was when we left the house.

But, she eventually woke up. She got really excited to see the hippos (which she knew by name... I was worried she'd think they had to look like her purple clippo hippo toy). And, she LOVED the zebra as well. She wanted to stay there for over 10 minutes watching it eat hay.

Then we got around to the giraffe, which was neat because it was in it's pen, and it walked over to the window that we were looking through and started licking it. Ellen had fun getting kisses from a giraffe.

She started yawning, so we headed home. It was a fun trip!

Eve of the 2nd birthday

Tomorrow is Ellen's second birthday... and all of the local family came down to celebrate it today. She is currently obsessed with Elmo. I don't know what the deal is, but she loves this furry red monster who talks in the the third person. So, we decided to go with it for her birthday theme. Erika spent all day in the kitchen yesterday making a cupcake cake to look like Elmo, and when Ellen saw it this morning she couldn't wait to bite into it.
Then I drove out and picked up the balloons that we had ordered. 12 primary-colored balloons and a mylar Sesame Street School bus. Ellen got even more excited when she saw all of those come through the front door.

Family members showed up and it was time for cake. We sang happy birthday and she had Mom's help blowing out the candles.

And then it was FINALLY time to bite into the cupcake. Ohhhhh... she loved it.

Then we moved the party inside and Ellen got to dig into her gifts (with Mommy's help of course). She was really spoiled.

Oma got her a baby doll. An item that she has been coveting for almost 3 months was finally hers. Oh the hours of dress up time that will be had. She even got a crib (edit: cradle) for the baby which we put next to her bed so that they can go "night-night" together.

Eventually the family had to leave, but before they left we managed to sneak in a cute photo of the three girls sitting together on the couch.

Thank you all for making it out, we had a blast!

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....