Clean Plate? Not So Much...

A couple of months ago, I started letting Ella feed herself, rather than being spoon or bottle fed all of her meals.  At first, she didn't seem to get it.  Then, one day, I loaded up her tray with food, turned away, and started cooking dinner.  When I turned back, I found that all the food was gone off her tray!  Imagine my delight over my big girl's skills, until I saw this....

Ella's Adventures

When you're 11 months old, there's never enough time in the day to accomplish everything.  Of course, that doesn't slow you down!  Here are a few things that Ella has been into lately...

 
Petting the dog...GENTLY...

Reading books and playing with friends...

 Climbing the stairs...note the fuzzy action shot...

Getting called away from the stairs by Mommy and Daddy, and learning to obey...

 Pulling all the pens out of the coffee table drawer...

 

Exploring the bookshelves - of course, being my daughter, she always goes straight for the Jane Austen shelf...that's Sense and Sensibility she's holding...

Having a chat with the baby in the mirror...

Pulling her favorite cookbook off the shelf in the kitchen...

Doing a few squats...

Going back to the stairs...

...and of course, putting EVERYTHING into the mouth to see how it tastes!!

Solo Week

This week, I'm a solo mom.  Ella and I are having fun at home, while James is here...
 

(source)


He's attending the International Stroke Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center...

(source)

I'm not thrilled about him being absent for so long, but we're doing fine, working and hanging out with friends.  So what are you up to this week?

Ice Storm

Last week, St. Louis experienced a strange weather event called an ice storm.  The first time I saw one of these was back when I was in law school, and I almost got trapped out in it....so I learned my lesson this time and stayed home.

Not that I had much choice, of course.

So how is an ice storm worse than a snowstorm?  Well, I'll tell you.  You know how when it snows, you can still walk through it because it's either soft and fluffy or cold and mushy?  Well an ice storm is neither soft, fluffy, cold, nor mushy.  It's just cold and hard and slippery.

And dangerous.

Imagine a big hard ice cube, like the kind you get when you freeze ice in those manual-filled ice trays in your freezer.  Now imagine a thick layer of that kind of ice all over the city.  Now imagine trying to chip that type of ice off your car.  Not fun. Here are a few pictures...

The poor UPS guy had to go out in it to deliver packages, but at least he waited until the road had been scraped off a bit.

 Ice on the power lines...not good.

Maybe some day I will live where we don't have these things.

Family Adventures: Car Show Part Two

While Snowmageddon finishes its work outside, I think I'll tell you a little bit more about the car show.  Today's topic is antique cars. 

So...way back in the far end of the arena, once you've moved past about 3 million dollars worth of cars, (no exaggeration there - they had Lamborghini and Bugatti there), there was a teeny little section of antique cars.  Some of them were restored, and those were nice, but some of them were actually in the original condition...they'd just been extremely well cared for!  I have no idea what the names of these cars are, but I took pictures, so that you could see them.  Maybe if we're lucky, Tommy McFarlin will leave us a comment telling us a little more about them...

I liked this one.  It was cool.

This one was in the original condition - not restored!!

So was this one, I think...
 

I wasn't so fond of this one's paint color...

What type of car do you like?

Snowmageddon

That's what they're calling our current weather pattern, and I find it oddly appropriate.  I spent 2 hours chipping ice off our cars this afternoon so that I could defrost them a bit and move them to a side street.  Unfortunately, since we live on a main road, the cars can't stay parked in front of the house or the snow plows might hit them.  It's called a "snow route," and if we leave our cars out, they will get ticketed and possibly destroyed!  Not cool.

So I headed out with the snow scraper, and this ice was no joke. 

For those of you who have never had to deal with an ice storm, it's sorta like this.  You know when you make those really big ice cubes in the ice cube trays, and they're hard and thick?  (Not like snowy, puffy ice?)  Well, imagine that kind of ice about half an inch thick ALL OVER YOUR CAR.  Not cool.  I couldn't even get any of the doors open on the Honda Pilot, so I finally had to break into the trunk and climb over the seats.  Then, after running the defroster for about 20 minutes, I was able to ram the doors open from the inside using my shoulder.  Then, after about 15 minutes more, I was able to get our huge (3 foot long) snow scraper and start chipping away at the ice on the windshield...all the while standing in ice above my ankles. 

Thank goodness for my snow boots! 

In any case, that's done now, so we should be fine.  I went to the grocery store on Sunday night to stock up on our groceries, so we've got enough food for the week.  We should be fine as long as our electricity doesn't go out.  That makes me a little nervous, especially because I REALLY don't want our pipes in the basement to freeze and burst, but we'll see what happens.

Ella is thrilled because her daddy is staying home all day, and she loves to play when we're both here.  She brings all of her toys up to show them to her daddy, and he gets so excited!  (I guess she figures that I see her toys all the time, so there's no point in showing them to me...)  He'll probably be at home tomorrow, too, since on top of this ice storm, we're supposed to get about a foot of snow.

Yippee.

Maybe tomorrow, I'll post some pictures.