Skiing with Eliana for the Second Time

I took Ellie skiing for the first time two weekends ago at Bridger Bowl. We had a really good time.

This past weekend, Elizabeth was gone to Seattle for 4 days, so I invited my folks out to help watch Eliana. One of those days, we headed up to Bridger again. I commissioned my dad to take pictures while we skied. Thanks, Dad!

(I'm including this just to freak out Mommom. Please observe the grip Ellie has on the bar.)

I really don't know how to teach a kid how to ski other than to take her to the top and tell her to point her skis down the hill. That's pretty much what we've done both times.

Ellie did pretty well, but she refused to snow plow. She was all about the going parallel down the hill and then screaming out for me to stop her when she felt uncomfortable. She really hasn't gotten the hang of turning yet, either. On the first few runs on the second day, she'd just spin around until she was going backwards and then she's do an excellent reverse snowplow to come to a stop. She told me she needed new skis that would go straight. It looked to me like the rental shop might've given her longer skis than she had on her first day up, so we went back to check. They said we had the shortest skis they carried, so we headed to the lodge's deck for some sun, food, and hot chocolate. Afterward, things went better. Ellie's favorite part of skiing so far has been the hula hoop set up on the bunny slope for kids to duck under.

(Pay no attention to the magically appearing goggles in the third frame. I'm sure those events occurred in exactly the sequence they're presented.)

While we were skiing, Ellie kept wanting to find some way to exert independence. She seemed to decide that the lift was the place to do it, so we routinely would have disagreements as we were trying to load the chair because she did not want to ride on the same chair. She wanted to ride it by herself. I laughingly mentioned that to the lifty, who told me that they'd let a kid ride by herself if the parent approved. I didn't see that coming.

What was particularly funny to me is that Ellie seems really old and tall compared to most of the kids on the bunny slope. Bozeman is such a ski crazy town that most of the kids Ellie's age are out there skiing by themselves, ripping it up. You basically can't find kids Ellie's age on the bunny slope unless they drop by to practice skiing backwards or to ski with their younger siblings.

This is a much more typical sample of what you'll find on the bunny slope at Bridger.

See, one of the great things about Bozeman is that I look distinctly non-crazy (in comparison) for teaching my 3.5 year old to ski. I could have been this guy:

The Carousel Ride

Our big excursion during the reunion was a trip to go see my mom's best friend Wendy, who now lives about an hour away from Hesston. I haven't seen Wendy since New Jersey (about 12 years ago?), so it was really fun to see her. She planned a great outing for us, including a trip to ride a 108-year old carousel in Abilene. It was built by C.W. Parker, who was apparently known for his amusement rides. The carousel has horses that rock back and forth, and the carousel turns on a track, like a circular railroad. It runs on its original steam engine and has a cool Wurlitzer organ that plays the music. Ellie liked that a lot. =D She didn't actually ride a horse on our ride, but she rode in one of the sleds with Mommom and had a great time. Wendy and I rode the horses, and there were just the four of us on the ride. Here's a look:

First Prayer...

Tuesday night Eliana said her first spontaneous prayer! I am so excited to see this side of her developing as she learns about God and a relationship with Him. I wasn't home when she said her first prayer, but Leif tells it like this:

During Ellie's bedtime routine Leif took her to the potty and she sat on it and peed. Then, when she was done, she started to get up, then stopped and sat back down. She closed her eyes really tight and said, "Thank you for food, and thank you for pee-pee in the potty!"

How sweet is that? I love to see her expressing thankfulness, especially thankfulness to God, in the little things. I love to see her making those connections. I love to see her growing up in both stature and wisdom, and I love stories like these!

Door Opener.

I'm pretty sure Eliana learned how to open her door today. I put her in her bedroom and shut the door so I could take a shower (and leave her with limited space to destroy, which she did!) and when I got out of the shower and dressed I heard something in the kitchen. Lo and behold, it was Ellie! I'm thinking that means it just got a little harder to contain her or keep her out of rooms we don't want her in.

Sweet Pea

Every year we go to the Sweet Pea festival and we ignore the "children's activities" area. But not this year!! No, this year Leif and Neal took the kids to go build birdhouses in the activity area. I had to admit that the birdhouses turned out quite nicely! Then they admitted that the kiddos did very little to help with the construction and instead had fun just tapping the wood with nails instead. Still, it looks like they all had a grand time.

They stashed the birdhouses in some dense shrubbery so they didn't have to carry them around during the festival, but I am sad to say that when they returned to retrieve them at the end of the day, someone had taken them! We spent a good while looking for them, but they were no where to be found. How sad! Ellie didn't seem to notice though, so I suppose all is well. There will always be next year to build another!

(Oh, and I should add that Ellie and Zach and Neal made it into the video segment on the news about the Sweet Pea children's activities! It was just a quick little shot of them, but it was there! Or so I'm told... I didn't actually get to see it, but the Richters did. Sigh... My little girl's moment of fame... and I missed it. Oh well!)

Fishing

Having spent my summers in New Jersey growing up, fishing on Alloway lake is one of my fond memories. It's strange, too, because I don't know that I like fishing. But I have lots of memories of hours on the lake with my grandfather, sitting on the hot metal bench seats of the boat in my swimsuit, fishing. And somehow I always thought that my daughter would have those same sorts of memories. But we don't have a family vacation spot along the lake to retreat to every summer, and Leif doesn't fish, so I figured there would be no fishing memories for my little girl.

But I was wrong!

Lucky for us there is a pond in the middle of our subdivision that is perfect for daddies to take their kids. And lucky for us our friend and neighbor Neal DOES fish. So when he called to invite Leif and Ellie to join him in taking his kids (ages 1 and 2) fishing, I was pretty excited. I didn't go with, but as far as I can tell they had a good time. They did catch a fish, though no one was actually holding onto the rod when it was hooked, so they claim to share the victory. I'm sure there will be more evening fishing trips with the Richters. As for now, here are pictures of Eliana's very first fishing trip...

Camping with Eliana

Last weekend we decided to do something we've been dreading doing... taking Eliana camping for the first time. Leif and I have enjoyed camping and backpacking since we moved to Montana, but haven't been since Ellie was born. Now that Eliana is two and is able to sleep in a "big people" bed without the restraints of rails, we plunged headfirst into the adventure and took Ellie camping.

Really, though, it wasn't so much our drive to camp that spurred us to such adventure last weekend. It was the RightNow development family picnic and weekend camping trip that encouraged us to give it a go. And as we are not really car campers, we borrowed a tent from Carl and Liv and spent our night in the company of Leif's coworkers' families, also camping with children.

Camping with other families with kids is definitely the way to go.

We were on a site with Carl and Liv, whose son Cale (1 year) is one of Ellies little play buddies. She and Cale had a GRAND time getting as dirty as possible. Seriously... how dirty can one child get? I'm pretty sure Ellie was trying to set a world record!

The other family camping on our site had 3 children: a 7 year old son, and 3 year old twins, a boy and a girl. And Ellie just decided to hang out with them while we camped! They ran around, played in the water, played with pinecones, took turns swinging in the hammock... The four of them were great together! They stayed within our (fairly large, given that it housed 3 tents and a luxury camper!) campsite and any time I realized neither Leif nor I were paying close attention to where she was I'd look up and find her playing with the other kids. It was great!

Then it came time to go to bed. This is the part we were afraid of. Once it got dark (about 10:00 at night) I took Ellie back to the tent and we got ready for bed. I got her all situated and she seemed to think it was funny that we were sleeping in a "triangle". So I tucked her in and told her it was time to go to sleep, and then the talking started. She just chatted and giggled and had a great time! For TWO hours! She seemed to think that it was a slumber party and that I was there to talk to! That's great, but other families were trying to sleep, too, and they could all hear her. Especially when she started looking at her flashcards. (Silly me, I thought they might get her to quiet down and rest, like reading a book before bed!) She was very excited and the next morning people gave us a hard time about our daughter reciting things like "Mayan Temple!" and "Tower of Pisa!" late at night. Whoops!

But all in all the night went so well that we decided to stay a second night with everyone else. The second night I was smarter, though, and put her to bed just before it got dark so she wouldn't be scared in a dark tent all alone and I could leave her there until she fell asleep. It worked like a charm! She didn't even wake up when we came in later to go to bed ourselves. Hooray!

So... it was a successful camping trip. And I think we'll even try it again once or twice this summer yet! Now we just have to find some friends to camp with so there are other children for Ellie to play with. Anyone want to come??

Hmm.... What did I miss?

Well, since Eliana hasn't been napping regularly any more, I'm finding it difficult to keep the blog updated. Mostly I find it difficult to get photos uploaded to Picasaweb so I can put them on the blog. The blogging I can do from pretty much anywhere via the laptop. The pictures, however, are on Leif's computer in the office, so when I'm in there Eliana tends to come after me and play with things she shouldn't and destroy stuff. So... without the safe haven of naptime I haven't quite figured out the best way to do that! But I will try to fill you all in on the highlights of July that I missed while we had visiting family and then napless days...

On July 12, a week before Eliana's birthday, I, Elizabeth, ran my first 5K! Leif ran with me (at my speed) as my moral support. And I am happy to report that I did indeed run the whole thing, and in 31 minutes. That is now checked off my list of things to do someday, though I hope to continue running. It's pretty good exercise!

One night a few days before Eliana's birthday she stepped on a bee in the pool and got stung. It was her first bee sting, so I guess we learned that she isn't allergic. She didn't even freak out about it. She just picked her foot up and said, "Ow, ow, ow, ow" until someone came to get her. All told it went way better than I expected it would! She was such a good girl and even let us pick at her foot with tweezers to get the rest of the stinger out.

I still have to scan in the picture, but the week before her 2nd birthday Eliana drew her first recognizeable picture!! It's a face and you can actually tell that by looking at it! She loves to draw and it's not uncommon to see her with her little magnetic doodle pad singing to herself, "One ear, another ear, one eye, another eye..." as she draws. And most of the time she is very sure to draw eyebrows, too.

I'm sure there are other things I missed along the way as I wasn't getting any blogging done. There will be larger posts detailing some of the bigger things that we've done recently, such as taking Eliana on her first camping trip, going to the Bite of Bozeman (you didn't think we'd skip blogging about the turkey leg this year, did you?), and the Sweet Pea Festival, which we're in the middle of right now. So there are posts and pictures coming. It's just taking a little longer than I expected. Bear with us and we promise to do our best to keep the bloggy goodness coming.

The Result....

Well, for the past few weeks we have been fighting and fighting and fighting with Eliana over naps and bedtime. She used to be very predictable... down for a nap around noon, sleep until 4:00, down for bed at 8, sleep until 8. It was great!

A few weeks ago, though, she started fighting us on naps. She hasn't been ready for a nap until about 3:00 or later, and she sleeps for 2 hours. Then she's not ready for bed until much later than 8. There are tantrums, she got out of bed repeatedly, she climbed out of the crib when we put here in there to contain her... it was not good.

So yesterday I did something I have not been looking forward to. I cut out her nap. She's just barely two, but she cannot keep the schedule she was on, with a two hour late afternoon nap followed by sleeping from about 10:30 (or later!) to 8. She was waking up grumpy from naps and in the morning and it was just wearing her (and us!) down. It called for desperate measures, and so we cut out her one and only nap.

The result? She was pretty tired yesterday around 3:30 (as usual) but instead of putting her down to sleep I just let her watch a movie. She curled up on my bed with a blanket and her milk and watched the movie. Though she was pretty drowsy, she didn't fall asleep. She had a couple hours of down time, and then she was up and running again! Leif put her to bed around 7:45 or so and she didn't fight him. And she slept until after 8 this morning! I don't actually know what time she got up, because she woke me up! But Leif left a little before 8 and she wasn't awake yet, so he just left her door open so she could come find me when she did wake up. And she came in at 8:20.

So that's what we have. A 2 year old who didn't take a nap and for the first day in several weeks, it went smoothly. There may still be days where she'll need a nap, especially if we're out and about and she gets worn out in the morning. But if she isn't asleep before 2:00 I'm not going to let her sleep. That was a miserable pattern. We'll wean her off the movies some other time, but for now it's the only way I can find for her to sit still for down time. And she definitely needs that down time still! But today was good. She had a couple freak-out tantrums (mostly when she was tired right before down time and bed), but those are pretty standard these days. She's 2. So we'll see how today goes and take it one nap-less day at a time.

Booster seats and potty chairs....

Ellie has officially graduated out of her booster seat at the table. The past couple weeks we've been having to fight with her over mealtimes because she didn't want to sit at the table. Finally a lightbulb went on and I asked her if she wanted to sit in a big chair at the table. She did and she's been happy to sit in the big people chairs ever since! So we finally took the booster seat off her chair and stored it in the basement with all of the other equipment she's outgrown. She used that booster for about a year and a half, so I guess we got our $20 out of it. It was definitely cheaper than a highchair! I guess our little girl is growing up...

In other growing up news, even though we haven't *really* been working on potty training with her (other than the occasional trip to the bathroom to sit on the potty during a diaper change or asking if she needs to go potty, but nothing consistent) she is getting ready. Yesterday we were in the car driving when she called from the back seat, "Diaper change, Mommy!" That usually means she's *going* to need a diaper change. So we asked her to wait a bit (though she kept insisting she needed a diaper change) and headed in to the first grocery store we saw and found the bathroom. Of course, someone was in there so we had to wait. But when the person finally came out we went in and (though I was sure it was a lost cause at this point) I sat Ellie on the potty and she peed!! It's the first time she's ever told us in public and then waited until we got there! So we did a little happy dance, especially since we were planning on really working on the potty training once she turns 2, in a couple weeks. All told she went potty in the potty 3 times yesterday and even went when she woke up dry after her nap today.

So that's the exciting news from our neck of the woods!! =D Booster seats and potty chairs.

WALL*E

Ellie saw her first movie in a theater yesterday. Leif was gone hiking with a friend, so Taylor and I took the Ellie and Corinne garage sale-ing. Afterwards Taylor suggested we take the girls to see the new Disney movie WALL*E. Neither of the girls had ever seen a movie in the theater before, so we sat close to an exit just in case! They did get a bit wiggly halfway to three quarters of the way through the movie, but in general they did very well! Ellie sat in her own seat (once she figured out how to sit so it didn't fold up on her!) and ate popcorn through most of the movie. A couple times she settled for sitting on my lap when the movie lost her attention, and there was a stretch there where she kept trying to sit on the floor despite my attempt to convince her that it was dirty and she shouldn't sit there. She didn't cry out at all or disrupt the movie, except a couple times when she pointed to the screen and said, "WALL*E broke it!!" She was very concerned when things "broke" during the movie. Considering the main character was an antiquated trash compacter who kept spare parts for himself on hand, that happened a few times. The other disturbance wasn't so big as it was cute, and I don't think the disturbee minded too much. Ellie managed to sneak herself over a couple seats (next to Taylor's seat) and tapped the man in front of her on the shoulder and asked him, "You see WALL*E too?" He just grinned as I pulled her shirt to get her to come back to me and then went back to watching the movie with his kids. But Ellie liked it. I think if the animation had been a little more "cartoony" looking it would have held her attention better, but all in all it was a good experience. When we left the theater I asked her if she liked the movie and she said yes. I asked what movie we had seen and she said, "WALL*E!!" and when I asked what the movie was about she very seriously said, "WALL*E broke it." That was apparently what she remembered most of all!

WALL*E was a cute movie. It definitely has environmental under (or over?) tones to it, but it was cute. I think I would have preferred Horton Hears A Who as Ellie's first theater movie, but we missed that opportunity and this made for a fun afternoon.

Sidewalk Chalk

With the nice weather we've been having, Ellie and I have been spending more time outside together. On one such day last week, (Tuesday, I think) we raided the "outside activity bucket" and decided to play with the sidewalk chalk from Ellie's Easter basket. (That's why the chalk is shaped like eggs instead of, well, chalk.)

At first Ellie was more interested in the packaging than the chalk itself, even after I'd shown her what to do with it.

After a while, though, she got into it and drew lots of little lines all over the driveway. Though all she really drew was lines, she told me what each thing "was". She'd draw blue lines and say, "Heart." and draw pink lines and say, "Butterfly." And yes, she really does "draw" girly things like hearts and butterflies. She loves pink and purple and Barbie and princesses. She is a girl through and through. And even though she is wearing a yellow shirt in this picture, it has little rufflies on it, so it is, in Eliana's words, "CUTE." Emphasis hers.

Baking Cookies Together

Today Ellie and I made cookies together for the first time. She is getting old enough to do more and more activities together, and I thought she might enjoy a little baking. With 6+ inches of fresh snow outside, we needed a nice indoor activity and I thought this might just be the thing. She was hooked from the moment I gave her an apron.

I thought ahead and pre-measured everything so that Ellie could dump the ingredients into the bowl on her own. And aside from her snitching a pinch or two of sugar here and there, it all went very well.

She had quite the technique to her ingredient dumping...

She was very patient while the batter mixed. I thought for sure she'd lose interest and want to go play, but she didn't. She just kept watching and saying things like, "Cookie!" and "Baking."

Soon it was time to put the cookie batter on the baking sheets, and she wanted to be a part of that, too! So every time I scooped some batter up, she'd grab the handle and say, "Squeeze!" and squeeze as hard as she could. Of course, she couldn't squeeze the batter out, but she didn't know that I was the one really doing the work. It seemed to make her very happy to have a job for this part of the cookie making process, too.

She also seemed to think that one of her jobs was to pick the craisins out of the cookies when she thought I wasn't looking and eat them. So I just gave miss sneaky her own pile of craisins to munch on so our cookies didn't have to go without.

All in all, it was a fun little adventure. She is definitely ready for this sort of activity, so I'm hoping to do more of them in the future! She was excited and engaged through the whole process, and she listened well when I told her what to do. It was fun to do together, and best of all we got to sit down and eat cookies together afterward. That's the best!