10 Pictures and 10 Things

1

I kind of have a frosty blue light going on with these photos, let's just pretend that it was intentional.

Reality: I don't even know how to use this camera.

But even with the frosty glow going on it looks better than our old point-and-shoot so I still feel like a winner of a photographer.

2

The things you get excited about as a parent are kind of hilarious/ridiculous.

I just danced around for joy and excitedly told Adam that I found the brand of overnight diapers that we need to get for Ella because it sounds like they will actually work!

Who gets excited about things like that?

Moms of girls who have soaked their bed every single night for the past two weeks, that's who!

Once I get those diapers in my hands the amount of laundry I have to do will greatly be reduced-- yeehaw!

3

Went to the doctor last week, I am 2cm dilated and 70% effaced and I've had mild contractions for the past several days (strong enough to wake me up in the night), this baby is getting ready to show his cute face!

4

What is going on in these pictures: 

Ella is a far more intense organizer than I had ever guessed before now.

In these pictures she is carefully transfering almost every single toy from her toy bin to the bottom two stairs, lining them all up.

This is an absolute favorite activity of hers.

Not pictured:

The toys sat there for majority of the day.

I was in the kitchen making dinner (a rare moment when she actually let me make dinner instead of needing my attention) and I heard Ella start singing a little tune that involved the words "meekah meekah (clean up clean up).

I glanced over and noticed that she was transferring the toys from the stairs back into the toy bin.

A few minutes late I glanced over again and ALL of the toys had been cleared from the stairs and put back in the bin.

Um...what child does that?!

Voluntarily decides that she needs to clean up her toys, I mean for reals?

And since then she has done it several more times with her toys and her books and the tupperware in the kitchen that she had thrown around

I don't even have to mention anything, she will tell me, "Meekah meekah!" and start putting things away all on her own.

Ah-mazing.

5

 Ella calls me "Annie."

She sometimes calls me "Momma" too but she most often calls me "Annie."

I kind of love it.

It just kind of fits her personality for her to call me by my first name.

When we are at the store or even at home and she doesn't know where I am she calls out, "Annie? Annie!"

Um yes, I love her.

6

Rockstar wrote about this thing at this bakery in NY called a Cronut.

It's a doughnut and croissant combined.

I desperately need one.

7

Along with the clean up song she sings E-I-E-I-O.

And ABCs is a favorite, she asks me to sing that one to her all the time.

Sometimes people look at you funny when they hear you singing ABCs as you walk down the aisles of the grocery store.

8

In the past 4 weeks there have been about a dozen occasions where I went into Ella's room in the morning to find that she had thrown up in the night. 

All day she would act totally normal but every few nights she would throw up. 

I started monitoring her diet and how close to bed time she would eat and other things like that and finally figured out what is causing it: the water from the faucet. 

We drink bottled water because we think our water tastes nasty and when we first moved in Adam got sick and he claimed that it was because he drank the tap water.

I scoffed at this conclusion, claiming that the we lived in the United States, not some 3rd world country.

Surely our country would not allow regulated city water to be contaminated. 

But then I realized that every time Ella had thrown up was after she took a bath.

One of her favorite bath time activities is to drink from the faucet.

She just recently started doing that but now it's her favorite thing to do.

So then I started watching her closely during bath time, making sure she never drank the water and she hasn't thrown up since, which means that it was the tap water that was upsetting her stomach so much.

9

A problem I have: how hard it is to not buy adorable kids clothes at the thrift store when they are only 50 cents-$2 a piece.

I found this little blue and white dress at the thrift store for $1, I love the scalloped collar with the lace on it.

And it's so well made and just cute.

And I've found that it's even easier to find cute boys clothes at thrift stores that I like than girls clothes, so I keep coming home with more and more things for him.

10

I LOVE Ella's sense of humor.

It is seriously the best and I cannot wait to see how it develops as she grows up.

It's hard to explain a sense of humor so you might just have to take my word for it, but I'll try to explain.

She laughs at herself all the time and funny things that she accidentally does.

Example: She was wearing a shirt over her face so she couldn't see (a normal thing for her to do, because she thinks it's funny) and she was walking around this way and slipped on a book on the tile floor which made her do a kind-splits thing and fall to the ground and she laughed hysterically at how crazy the whole fall had been.

And she laughs at funny sounding words and knows how to make the words sound funnier to make them even better to laugh about and will repeat the joke later on.

How does a 1 1/2 year old know how to joke like that?

She must get it from her Dada.

And two bonus pictures of her first ice cream cone:

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