Interviews with Eliana

Since I now know how to post videos again, I figured I'd give you some interviews with Eliana. These are from a few weeks ago. =D

There's something silly afoot!

The Anatomy of a Snort

This sweet little girl loves to snort. It's true. First, you scrunch up your face like this:

... and then you snort!

And then you follow up each snort with bouts of wild laughter....

That's my girl!

You Crack Me Up!

This is one of Ellie's new phrases. If she thinks you did something funny, she'll say, "Mommy, You crack me up!" Sometimes, though, she really does crack me up.... like when she's singing into a hair dryer...

Song Maker-Upper

All of my life I have been making up songs. It's just one of those weird things about me. I choose to think that it's a gift rather than an oddity, but I'm pretty sure it's genetic.

And I appear to have passed this marvelous gift on to my daughter.

Just now Eliana was happily singing "Jingle Bells" while I was making some cheesy eggs. So to the tune of Jingle Bells I started singing, "Cheesy eggs, cheesy eggs, cheesy eggs today..." and without skipping a beat she chimed in, "Oh what fun are cheesy eggs while we're at the farm!"

Now, I have no idea where the farm line came from, but I'm impressed with her ability to improvise like that on the spot! She kept the tune, started the line the same as the regular song, and then improvised on the subject I was singing about.

Yep! It's definitely genetic....

The blanket bandit...

If ever you see a giggling pile of blankets at our house...

From Ellie and Robert

It's sure to contain an Ellie!

From Ellie and Robert

This is one of her favorite pastimes these days... covering up completely with a blanket and waiting to be discovered. She seems to get a big kick out of it and giggles like a maniac while she is hidden. Then she giggles even more when she is found!

Mismatched Sock Fun

I cleaned out my sock bin yesterday and found a few socks missing their mates. They've been missing for a while, so I was going to throw them out. They were fun, colorful socks, though, so I decided to keep them a little while longer, just in case I found a use for them. Well, today I found a good use for socks without matches...

Who knew a silly old sock could keep Ellie busy for so long? =D (There are more videos of the sock puppet fun coming...)

Our little WHO

What Leif is REALLY doing when he says he's washing Ellie's hair...

Eliana's New Slide

Another something that happened during the blogging lapse... Poppy added a SLIDE to Ellie's swingset! As you can imagine, she is thrilled with it and loves to play on it! And right after she mastered sliding down it, she mastered.... yup! Climbing UP it! Crazy girl.

This picture cracks me up!

Knock, Knock!

Ellie just told her first Knock Knock joke! =D

I've been saying, "Who's there?" when she says knock knock, (which she says every time she knocks on something) and just now we walked through the door and she grinned and said, "Knock knock!" and I said, "Knock, knock!" and then she chimed in with "Who's there?" and when I repeated it, she said, "The door!"

She gets it! Sort of.... (we still have to work on the punchlines!)

The Breakfast of Champions...

Ellie is very particular when it comes to her breakfasts. She will eat pretty much anything and everything for lunch and dinner, but she seems to wake up knowing EXACTLY what she wants to eat for breakfast, and nothing else will do. Some days it's cottage cheese. Some days it's toast. Other days it's hot dogs. Today it was macaroni and cheese and pepperoni.

And so, while the mac and cheese was in the microwave heating, we went through this line of questioning:

Me: Do you want some grapes this morning?
Ellie: NO!
Me: Cottage cheese?
Ellie: NO!
Me: Do you want juice?
Ellie: NO!
Me: Do you want some milk?
Ellie: NO! Mac and cheese! (She actually pronounces it 'ack-cheese)
Me: It's cooking, Honey. Do you want some toast?
Ellie: NO!
Me: Okay, here's your mac and cheese. It's hot, though, so you have to blow on it.
Ellie: Thank you. (blows on it until it's cool enough to eat.)

Somehow waiting for your food to cool while you're sitting there blowing on it is SO much better than waiting for it to cool in the freezer while you sit there with nothing on the table in front of you. And now she's happily stuffing her face with mac and cheese. Silly girl.

Children and VCRs

What is it about VCRs that makes children want to stick things in them? Toys... hands... when will they learn?

Hello, Goodbye

Hello!



Goodbye!

and have a good day!

Silliness

It occurs to me that some people just aren't silly. I guess I'd never realized this before because I come from a long lineage of silliness. I never really considered the possibility that I may someday have a child who isn't silly. I'm not sure what I would do with a child like that, since I am pretty much silly to the core. Fortunately for me, my daughter is silly to the core, too. As if to prove that point, here she is playing a couple weeks ago:

Control

Currently, Ellie seems to value being in control of a situation over receiving a positive outcome. Case in point, when she takes a bath, she would much rather be in control of the cup which dumps water on her hair than allow me to pour the water. Of course, when she controls the cup, much more water runs into her face and eyes, but that doesn't seem to matter. She lifted the cup. She dumped the water. She cheers at her accomplishment through clenched eyes. I certainly encourage the cheering because she is managing to get her hair washed, somewhat, and because she's overcoming her fear of getting water in her face.

She's also taken to climbing into her crib when it's time for bed. I taught her to use my hands as footholds as she shimmied up the bars. It was great fun, which of course was a good enticement to climb into bed. It was also interesting because it was another chapter in the ever morphing going-to-bed ritual. Once crib climbing was discovered, pushing the CD player's play button lost its luster and closing the door and turning out the light were long forgotten. Of course, going to bed became a less contentious process once she decided that climbing in was her idea and that she chose to scale the bars.

The last few nights, however, climbing into bed hasn't worked so well; she's decided that she needs to do it by herself. No footholds provided by dad will be accepted. She's tried piling things to create a starting point from which to shimmy up, but to no avail. She can't get in on her own, yet. Eventually, she or I get tired of her attempts; she'll wander off to something more interesting in the room and/or I'll just pick her up and drop her into the crib. Then she gives me a sort of "You didn't do the ritual right, so I don't have to go to sleep" look and proceeds to bounce around her crib, rather than lay down to get tucked in. It's a bummer because I don't get a good night kiss and she doesn't seem to fall asleep for an hour or two.

The going-to-bed ritual has also picked up running off to give Mommy a kiss. I used to suggest it to her and she'd go find Elizabeth, or more likely, try to find Elizabeth and get distracted on the way, at which point Elizabeth would hear her getting into something, find her, and ask her if it was time for a kiss. Now she'll decide it's that time, say something about "kiss," and go running off to find Mom, without prompting.

In other news she seems to moving out of the peek-a-boo phase into the ring-around-the-rosy phase. Great squeals of joy follow every song ending "down!" which she will merrily interject at any point beginning with "ashes, ashes." She's now working on the phrase "play again" to tell me it's time to get up and restart singing and dancing. In case you're wondering, the song's title seems to be "Ashes, Ashes" according to Ellie.

11 Socks.

What's that you say? 11 socks? Oh. Here. Let me finish the list:

11 socks
5 hair bows
2 tubes Orajel

That's what I found behind Ellie's crib today.

When I went in to get her from her nap, she'd stuffed Star Bear and Duck behind the crib, with their little heads peeking out over the top as if watching her. She stood on her tippy toes, trying to peer over the back of the crib saying, "Bunny! Bunny!" So I climbed under the crib and reached WAAAAAY back and grabbed the bunny she'd thrown back there. It was then that I thought it might be a good idea to actually move the crib (without her added 25 lbs, of course) and see what else was back there. And that's when I found 11 socks, 5 hair bows, and 2 tubes Orajel.

So you see, sometimes it's not the washing machine that eats the socks. It's the crib.

Potatoes

My daughter just hauled a giant bag o' potatoes out of the pantry into the living room. Then she pulled one out of the bag and ran over to me signing and saying "Please! Please!"

Silly girl! And when I told her that we had to cook it before she could eat it, she ran off (leaving the lonely potato with me) saying, "Cookie! Cookie!"

I guess it's a good thing I haven't made holiday treats yet, huh? She seems to think she needs some. (OH - but I suppose I didn't need to make them. She is currently sitting on top of the bag of potatoes with the giant tub o' animal cookies in her lap. She found her cookies.)

Naughtiness, Silliness, and Hat Love

Ah... Blissful silence. That's what I thought to myself the other day. Until, that is, I realized that Ellie was not down for a nap and that blissful silence probably meant she was getting into trouble. Sure enough, I found her in my bedroom, sitting in the window sill, digging through my purse and playing with my credit cards. And this is the look of Ellie caught being naughty:


So we had a little conversation and it went something like this:

Mommy: "Ellie, are you doing something you're not supposed to?"
Ellie: "Yep."
Mommy: "Did Mommy catch you playing in her purse?"
Ellie: "Yep."
Mommy: "Should you put that back in Mommy's purse?"
Ellie: "Yep."
Mommy: "Can I have a kiss?"
Ellie: "No."
... and off she ran.

This, however, is a completely different sort of look for Ellie, but one she's been sporting lately. Mommy and Daddy's clothes on her head. Almost always from the dirty laundry, too. *sigh*



But when I ask her to put Daddy's shorts back in the laundry she says, "No." and runs out of the room giggling, trailing the shorts behind her.


The toy of choice yesterday, though, was this hat. Once she learned that she could see out the mesh top, there was no end to the fun.


She even abandoned the pair of shorts she had been playing with. Notice, though, that they aren't back in the laundry basket where they should be... Apparently the floor is a better place for clothes.


Seriously though... the headless hatter cracks me up. She ran around like this for a good half hour, giggling like crazy.


Oh look! There IS a head under there! Good... I was beginning to wonder...

So there you have it. The silliness that is my daughter.

The Playpen.

I have never been one to put Ellie in a playpen very much. In fact, I don't think I've put her in one since she's been able to crawl. But the pack-n-play is set up so one of Ellie's friends could nap upstairs the other day, so we put her in it just to see what she would do. She loves it! She runs around it (which means very small circles, since it's smaller than her bed) and she peeks through the sides and she stomps her feet and lays down and rolls and giggles and giggles and giggles. Three days now she's had a blast in this little cage she can't get out of. I don't quite understand it... She's got a whole house to run around in and yet she prefers a box with mesh walls. Crazy girl.