22 Months

To maintain the pattern of posting these monthly updates too late, here is Ellie's 22 month stats. :)

Unfortunately, I don't know how much Ellie weighs, however I know she is healthy. :) She has moved completely into 2T clothes and quickly growing into 3T clothes. I can't believe it! It seems like she grew so slowly (in the weight category) the first 7 months of her life. She has beyond caught up with it now. Based on bathroom scales, Ellie weighs somewhere around 32 pounds. It has gotten to a point that I can hurt my back if I throw her in the air or pick her up awkwardly.

Ellie is talking up a storm! My favorite thing at the moment is she answers, "What?" when she doesn't understand something. It is so funny! She is talking in sentences, answers questions, asks questions, and counts to three. In addition, her words are quickly becoming more understandable to people other than Justin and I. Yay!

She loves to sing: LOVES LOVES LOVES it! Her favorite playlist include: Twinkle Twinkle, Happy and You Know It, the ABCs, the Itsy Bitsy Spider, Jesus Loves Me, Row Row Row Your Boat, Nighty Night, B-I-N-G-O (but we actually sing it as E-L-L-I-E), and the Farm Song. Many times she will bust into song and ask us to sing along. Sometimes she gets picky about which octave Justin sings in and will stop and say "no Daddy!" - so he has to bump it up to falsetto. Ha ha! One of my favorite things is every night I sing our family's "Nighty-Night" song to Ellie and she has started singing it with me. She matches most of my pitches and sings the lyrics. I would love to get it on video soon.

Speaking of singing, one really sweet moment happened the other night at dinner time. At each meal we eat together, we pray before we eat. Most of the time it is Justin or I praying and Ellie sitting quietly with her head bowed and holding our hands. However, on this particular night Ellie wanted to say a prayer. We said, "Ok! Go ahead, Ellie." Before we knew it, she started singing "Jesus Loves Me" as her prayer. I'm pretty sure it doesn't get sweeter than that. We all sang along with Ellie and when we were done there were tears in all of our eyes. :)

We enrolled Ellie into swimming lessons again this summer. Unfortunately with all of our recent travels, Ellie had to miss three out of the first four lessons. However, we decided to keep her enrolled since it is still cheaper for us to swim as a family in those lessons than it would be to go to the pool six times. The lessons take place at Mt. Hood Community College's learner pool - with approximate temperature of 90 degrees. Besides the massive amount of chlorine and expected pee in the pool (c'mon, you know it's true), it is like a hot tub. This past Monday we went to her first lesson after the break. I was expecting Ellie to be reserved and a little behind in the class, but I was completely wrong. She blew bubbles, kicked, jumped, and splashed with the best of them! She even jumped in twice and went completely underwater. To be honest, this completely freaked me out - but Ellie came up with a giant smile both times. Wow! The instructor said that she is ready for this and as long as we don't freak out, she will learn that this is a good thing to do. He also said it is a lot more difficult for the moms to watch this than the kid to do it. So true, so true. However, I will endure what it takes in order for Ellie to love water. :)

As mentioned in the previous post, Ellie experienced a lot of "firsts" on our recent vacation. One of these included bike rides (she rode in a bike trailer). She loved riding and wearing her special hat (helmet). She also loved the frequent stop at the horse stables. Ellie was so excited to see and pet these enormous animals! She would talk about them all day - telling us that she pet their nose, the sounds they made, and the fact that the "horse-ies pooped." She couldn't (and still can't) get over the fact that horse-ies poop. She talks about it all the time and I am just waiting for the nursery workers at church to pull me aside to talk about it. :)

Ellie is doing a better job of playing with other kids and sharing. I know this will be a work in progress for, I don't know, the next 16 years. :) But, it is great to see her interact well and share, especially when it is unprovoked by me. It still seems like she inherently knows the "pecking order" of the kids she is playing with - determined by the age of all the kids. If she is the youngest, she falls in order and looks up (or down, if she is taller - which is often the case) to what the other kids are doing. However, if she is the oldest - watch out. She does a pretty good job of sharing with younger kids, but she also gets kind of bossy. Oh boy! I don't know where she gets that from... :)

Finally, Ellie still will not eat meat. Period. I don't know how she does it, but it's like she subconsciously knows that something has meat in it and will not touch it - regardless of how we present it. Actually, to be fair - we were able to get her to eat a couple of bites of bacon by calling them meat chips. Nothing wrong with taking advantage of food she loves to rename something she will avoid. :) It's not that I necessarily mind that she won't eat meat, however - we like meat. In fact, we love it. Therefore, trying to cook for everyone is difficult. Unfortunately, that means Ellie is still mainly eating pasta for dinner. Is this bad? I keep waiting for the day she will at least try it. Until then, I will keep on presenting it and expect to have a back up plate of pasta or cottage cheese ready. :)