on Friday it snowed all day and we didn’t go out, so explored the house thoroughly – here’s what happened in the kitchen….
waving to mama and daddy here…. 
smiling for mama and daddy here…..
hmm, wonder what this is…?
places to go and things to do….
as long as we have the dishwasher dismantled why not make a bed for Pooh bear?
Tomorrow morning, Ella and Dominic will be left in the able hands of their grandparents for a couple of weeks while Suanna and I take what we hope is going to be one seriously awesome vacation. But fans of E&D updates, have no fear! Nana and Papa, Marmar and Gumpa all now have posting rights on Cerin Amroth. I hope they will make use of these rights in order to post regular updates on the kids, maybe even some pictures. I know I’ll be checking!
We’ve been in Michigan for a while now, the usual crazy Christmas time with family. The drama highlight came on Sunday when Ella fell out of a chair right onto her shoulder and sustained a minor fracture to her left collarbone. Managing the pain, the long waits at the hospital in Holland, the sling, and the need to be careful how she moves — Ella has handled it all with stoic determination. Recovery is proceeding rapidly — the sling is really a reminder and not a necessity now, and we’re already toning down the Tylenol a bit. I’m confident she’ll be back to normal by the time we get back from our travels — the real challenge is going to be finding room for all their new Christmas presents at home.
Dominic had his one-year appointment the other day: 22 pounds, 13 ounces. 31 inches. You can start to see his mobility thinning him out somewhat.
And Ella swore for the first time. Not with a swear word, technically speaking, but it was definitely swearing from a semantic standpoint. We were walking back inside from the car when she stopped, stamped her foot, and said, “Oh DARN it! I left my gloves in the car!”
Pumpkin Patch, Thanksgiving, and both birthdays. Starting here.
I thought I’d have a bit of fun with Ella after we got home from preschool. We were having fun talking to each other in a funny robot voice, but then I pretended that my voice was stuck in the funny robot voice, and that try as I might I couldn’t talk in any other way.
“Daddy! You’re just being silly,” she said at first, but the longer I stuck with it the more she began to wonder if something really was wrong.
A few minutes later, she came up to me and said “Daddy, I can’t find my Christmas ornament.”
This was the ornament she had made at preschool and that I had asked her to carry inside because my hands were full, and even cautioned her to keep a good hold on it and not lose it because Mama would love to see it. So when she said she couldn’t find it I blurted out, in my normal voice, “Ella! I told you to hold onto it carefully!”
Ella smiled. “See Daddy! I knew you weren’t stuck in the robot voice!”
Ella and I went to church alone yesterday morning because Big D has a bad cold. I was scheduled to help with serving communion during the church service. In our church, everyone comes to the front and stands around the table to receive communion in groups. I help pass around the cup of wine or the kids cup of grape juice. Ella loves going to the “welcome table.” She started calling it that based on a spiritual song, which we sang in church during communion and I continued to sing to her as a bedtime song.
Earlier this summer, when I helped serve communion and was alone in church with Ella, I had her stand right beside me as I served. She did this a few times and especially liked putting one hand on the cup if I was kneeling down to serve the kids cup. Unfortunately, space is rather limited around the table, so one of the church leaders requested that I stop taking Ella up with me. She was frustrated about it at first, but was okay with staying with Nate and going to the table with him.
Yesterday was the first Sunday I was in church with her alone and did not take her up to the table with me. I talked with her about it on the drive to church. I gave her two options — 1) come up with me and sit in the front row while I served, or 2) sit with the family of one of her Sunday school classmates while I was at the table. She chose the first option, saying she’d rather sit by herself.
When the time came, I took her up to the table with me, and we had communion together. I then walked her down to the front row. Just as I was turning to leave, she started crying, squirming, and saying she didn’t want to sit there. I panicked a bit because I needed to get back up to the front and didn’t have time to sort things out with her. I tried to convince her again that I would be back as soon as I was done serving, but she kept crying. I decided to leave her sitting there and went back up to the front. For the first few minutes, I heard her crying. Then she stopped making noise, but I could see her red, wet face when I glanced over a couple times.
After I was done serving, I took her by the hand and proceeded back to our seats. The whole time we were walking, she said (in a not-so-quiet voice) that she was upset that I left her sitting there. The congregation started singing a song, so I took advantage of the time to talk without disturbing everyone. I asked her why she was upset, and she told me that she wanted to go back to the seats we were sitting in to wait for me. I apologized to her and said that I had not understood that was what she wanted. I asked her whether she would be okay by herself next time if we did it that way, and she said yes.
So there is hope for rationally discussing a situation … so long as both parties know what the final agreement involves. I’m sure there will be another time to test our arrangement, so stay tuned.
You are no doubt familiar with the shambling walk of your typical zombie. The legs move forward haltingly, the feet land with a jolt, as if a little too much weight got thrown forward. And the arms, rather than moving back in forth in counterbalance to the legs, move, if they do at all, with no relation to the lower limbs. Perhaps one arm is crooked and held against the chest while the other sticks out in some random direction.
Imagine that zombie walk. Double the speed. Now you know what Dominic looks like these days.
Four years. Just typing it makes me go “wha-huh?!”
She had her birthday party today; it was the first year where we had way many more friends of hers we could invite than we had room for, thanks to preschool. But we managed to narrow it down to four, and it worked out just fine. While we were setting up decorations and she was working herself up into a tizzy of excitement, she said to me, “This is the happiest party day of my life!!” She could have taken the word ‘party’ out and I’m pretty sure the statement would still be true. She had a usual lazy morning at home, and later on she went with Suanna to get some decorations and party favors at Target while Dominic and I picked up the cake and snacks. The day before we had picked up the game Hullabaloo for the party and had tried it a couple times; she wanted desperately to play it when she got up today, but you could tell she also understood why waiting to break it out until the party somehow made it all the more special. She was courteous with her friends as they arrived, and for the first time in possibly forever she wasn’t the shyest kid in the room — two of her friends were engaged in a good bit of parent-leg-shelter-seeking for a while, and Ella herself was neither shy nor prone to the goofy flopping around that she sometimes resorts to when she doesn’t know how to behave socially. Now she’s watching Kiki’s Delivery Service — not from Netflix but her very own copy that she got for her birthday. On the phone with Nana she declared that it was her very favorite movie, which may not be far from the truth, though she did opt for a Cars theme for her party.
The sundry details … she sleeps from 8:30 at night until a somewhat variable time in the morning. Sometimes she’ll hear Dominic wake up around 6:30 and get up with him, though when she does she’ll usually stay curled up on the couch until 7:00 or 7:30, which seems like more of her natural waking time. She hasn’t napped all week, other than occasional car snoozes, though she’s still tired and a little crabby after preschool — I think her body is still working out where to put the extra sleep that she needs. I can count the number of times she has had a potty accident at night on half of one hand.
As for eating . . . well, not so much. She’s as finicky as I ever was. As we’re phasing pureed baby food out of Dominic’s diet, I was just remembering that for most of that period of Ella’s life she would only eat sweet potatoes and squash, whereas D has yet to meet a food he didn’t like. It was a long time ago now that we instituted the practice of insisting Ella eat what we eat for supper, denying her fruit afterward if she refuses to eat it, but having carrots, peppers, and other vegetables as “always allowed” fallback foods. More often than not she’ll call that bluff and end up eating very little for supper. Cheerios and raisins in the morning and peanut butter and jelly for lunch form the majority of her diet — good thing the snacks at preschool are decent!
But the best part of having Ella around these days is how irrelevant the preceding two paragraphs feel when trying to describe her. When your kids are very young those physical-sustenance details are a big part of who they are and how you engage with them. Now they’re sidenotes to a real live person who loves doing mazes (and is preternaturally good at them), playing games (gonna have to make her a Boardgamegeek profile some day soon), and pretending that she is Peter Pan. Or that you are Peter Pan and that she is John and that Dominic is Michael. Or that she is Peter Pan and that you are Ella. In Vermont for Thanksgiving at one point, she was Peter Pan and Gumpa was her cousin Caleb and she was introducing Caleb to the rest of us as Ella’s friends from preschool and apologizing for the fact that Ella was sick and couldn’t be there. Or something like that.
