December and January pictures and update!

Another two months have gone by and both kids have changed SO much!  John William is sitting, rolling all over the place, and laughing as much as ever.  He also babbles a lot (“bababa” “mamama”) and continues to delight us with his smiles and giggles and laughs.  He is also sleeping wonderfully after a weekend of “sleep training” two weekends ago.  He’s sleeping in his crib and sleeps a good 6-8 hours without eating.  He constantly is grabbing and putting things in his mouth.  He loves his exersaucer and his jumperoo.  He loves being out in public with lots of things to watch, but most of all he likes to watch his big sister.

And Elinor…talk about change!  She is like a completely different child with all the talking that she does!  She is talking in very complete, elaborate sentences and it is so joyful to have complete, understandable conversations with her.  I’m so relieved that I am able to hear her most of the time.  It seems that through context and knowing what her words sound like, I can figure it out.  She did start preschool on January 10 (two days/week) and I am finding that I do have a harder time understanding when she talks about things she does when I am not there.

Elinor is attending a school called Treehouse Nursery which is about 2 miles away from our house.  She goes on Mondays and Thursdays even though my work days are Mondays and Wednesdays.  We have her on a wait list for Wednesday, but until then, I am enjoying having a few hours with just John William on Thursday mornings.  Elinor has had some days where she cries a lot, but her teachers tell us that it’s getting better with every day.  The school has 16 kids per day and 4 teachers.  Elinor talks a lot about the food!  She really likes their oatmeal and bread!  She eats breakfast, a snack, and lunch there and then she is picked up at 12:45 and comes home for her nap.  We are paying for full days right now but I just can’t imagine her napping at school!  Eventually we will give it a try!  She loves doing art best of all.  They go outside pretty much every day; Elinor talks about finding worms under rocks.  They also have a circle time, do yoga, read books, have free play, watch puppet shows, etc.  We are very pleased with it so far and have had fun meeting the other kids and parents.

Here is a link to pictures from December.  We had a nice Christmas season.  Elinor loved our Christmas tree and helped decorate it and redecorate it daily!  I loved driving around with her after dark and hearing her exclaim, “There’s some lights!” as she spotted a house with lights.  She walked down Peacock Lane, rode through the PIR Festival of Lights, and went to Zoo Lights and rode the train! She also rode the Holiday Express Train which is an old steam train complete with lights and Santa  It was so fun having a toddler who appreciated doing all of these Christmas related things this year.  On Christmas Eve we all went with Miney and Jake to the downtown First Methodist Church for their children’s service and then to Kenny and Zuke’s for dinner afterwards.  On Christmas morning, we had fun hanging out here and skyping with Grandma and Grandpa Stoll before we went to my parents’ house for brunch and for the afternoon.  Then we had dinner with GrandJan at our house.  Elinor’s main present this year was a neat little play kitchen.  She got lots of food and dishes and cookware for it too.  I think her favorite present of all was a ladybug that shines stars and the moon up on the ceiling.  This ladybug has been named “New Ladybug” so as to differentiate from “Old Ladybug” which is a ladybug pillow pet that she got from her friend Clare.  She is very into ladybugs and also has “ladybug finger puppet” and “itty bitty ladybug”, which is a ladybug beanie baby that we got for her to take to school with her when the big pillow pet was proving to be an issue at school!  She wanted to have it sit with her at the table and take it on their outdoor walks and it was just getting filthy and in the way. 

With all the ladybug love going on at our house, we decided to give Elinor a ladybug birthday party!  She had ladybug cupcakes and a ladybug balloon and ladybug stickers for favors.  Here is a link to pictures from January including Elinor’s birthday party.  Aunt Bean was in town for the week of Elinor’s birthday and that was a huge treat. 

I’m going to list some more random tidbits of things going on around here, since this is the only place I’m keeping notes right now!

*Elinor and I have a conversation every day that I am home with her and Burke is at work.  Elinor:  “Where’s Daddy?”  Me: “He’s at work!” Elinor: “What’s he working on?”

*Elinor loves to get into our bed and pull up the covers and say, “Night night, Elinor’s going to sleep now!”  Then she’ll get out and say, “She’s awake”!

*She will go and “pick a flower” and bring it to me.  Definitely lots more “pretend” going on at our house!

*She’s starting to get a bit more jealous of baby brother.  She’ll want me to do something with her and I’ll tell her I can’t because I’m holding the baby, and she’ll say, “Put baby down over there!”.

*Elinor still likes the iPhone but her latest is “typing” on the iPhone.  She will ask to “send Jake a message” and want to type him a text message (gibberish).  She would rather type on the “puter”.  Now she likes Word documents, typing big or little letters or upper-case or lower-case ones, changing the color of the words, inserting charts, shapes or clip-art, etc!  We are finding out about lots of functionality of Word we didn’t know about previously!

*She sang the ABC song out of the blue one day while we were driving in the car.  We’d never even heard her try to sing that song before, and then we heard her do the whole thing!  The “lmnop” part is a bit hard, and she ends it with, “Now I ABCs, next time won’t you sing with me”.

*I think she might be an early reader.  She points to words and asks what they say.  She asks us to spell words and then she finds them on the keyboard and types them.

*Elinor and GrandJan looked up the meaning of Elinor and it means “Shining Light”.  Elinor likes to tell the story about looking it up on GrandJan’s iPhone.  I think she is quite pleased by the meaning of her name. 🙂

*We were at brunch with Aunt Bean, Miney and Jake, and Miney entertained Elinor by drawing the lights hanging from the ceiling at the restaurant.  Now Elinor still asks us to draw lamps and lights!

Ah, well, there are probably a million more things I could write that I’m not remembering.  This is what I get for not writing often enough!  Now that things are getting easier with two kids and I have my evenings back, I hope I can rectify this!

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