CinderElla

Ella has discovered Disney animated movies this month, and she seems particularly taken with one in particular...Cinderella.  (This is probably because they keep saying "Ella" in the movie.)  She always loves the scenes where the mice are singing and dancing as they do their work.  Apparently, this has inspired her to start doing some work of her own....

 However, that broom is a bit big for such a little person...
  

But don't worry.  She's pretty sure she can handle it.

See?

Pink Slippers

It's amazing to watch a kid learn to love something.  To see them go from a sleepy, tiny infant to an actual kid who has ideas and opinions.  Lately, Ella has developed quite a fancy for shoes.  Any kid of shoes.  Large ones, small ones, in between ones, red ones, black ones, shiny ones, ones with heels, ones that you run in, ones that you dance in, and other ones.  She'll raid my closet at any time of day she can reach it.  Pretty much every morning when I am busy making the bed, she comes in to join me for a shoe session.  She'll throw James's red tie around her neck out of his closet, slip on my high heels, and prance around until people start to admire her.  She LOVES the ones with heels.

But her pink slippers are her special shoes.

I think that she feels like a princess in these slippers.  She hunts them up every day, puts her tiny toes into them, and then gives you the "...okay, now I feel SO pretty" look. 

Of course, her favorite thing to do is dance in them...after all, isn't that what slippers are meant for?

Booster Seat

Well, I didn't post much this month.  You might have noticed, ha, ha!  July has just been a month where things went crazy at work, and now I'm just starting to get a handle on things again.  In any case, I will probably start doing some short little posts for awhile, so that I can post more often.  I've been struggling with wanting to write, and then realizing that I don't have time to write all that I want to say, so I don't end up writing anything.  I'm just going to do some short posts for awhile, and see how that goes.

Lately, Ella has started sitting in a "big girl" chair at lunch and dinner, with a booster seat to help her little 27" frame reach the food on the table.  She's so proud of herself, and she often goes around the dining room table, climbing up on each chair to try it out and see what the view looks like from each spot.  I finally got her to stop climbing up onto the table...at least for now. 

Fortunately, this seems to be helping us to solve the problems we were having at restaurants, too.  She used to always insist on standing up in her high chair, so we would have a wrestling match every time we went out to dinner.  Now, she doesn't do that because she likes sitting at the table with us and joining in the conversation.

Now if she could just get her daddy to let her drink out of his cup and eat off his plate, life would be awesome!

Changes

Well, friends, I've got a sad announcement to make.  After much careful consideration for several months, we have decided that we can't keep our dog Max, and we took him back to the Humane Society today.  (You might note that the title of the blog has changed, and it will change again when I figure out what I want to call it now.) 

This was a really hard decision for us (it involved some tears), but we truly feel that he needs a lot more space than we can give him, and we owed it to him to allow him to find a new family.  He's been a good friend, and we will miss him, but this was really the right thing for us to do.  Thanks for everyone who called or emailed to let us know how sorry they were about this - we appreciate it!

Slide!

I love playing with my little girl.  She is so much fun, and it is such a joy to watch her learn and explore.  Lately, she's been learning how to play on the playground, and she particularly loves to come down the slide.  She's often a little too brave, and she will try to come down a slide that is too high for her.

Here's a cute picture that our friend Mary Martha took a couple of weeks ago on the seminary playground...



















Sweet girl!