Christmas Decorating

We decorated for Christmas the weekend after Thanksgiving, and it turns out Ella LOOOOOVES Christmas decorations. She loves Christmas trees, lights, wreaths, snowmen, santas, all of it.

And even more than seeing decorations, she likes putting them up and decorating. Here is some of her handiwork -

Hanging window clings on the back door





Glenn gave her a countdown to Christmas calendar where you put up one ornament on the tree each day, and she is quite pleased with it



And here she is doing a little pre-December Christmas calendar practice


Helping to decorate the Christmas tree








Every morning the when we go downstairs, Ella turns on the Christmas tree lights first thing. She says "I check on the Christmas tree, it's my project."

Steve put up our outside lights and she loves them as well. She asks if she can touch them and wants to know where the button is to turn them on like the Christmas tree.

Even Nomar is getting into the Christmas spirit, I wonder who took ornaments from the tree to decorate his peaceful napping spot?

Dinosaur Hatching

Lately Ella is really interested the process of how things happen, like what happens to the sun at night, watering plants to see if they'll grow, why she can't touch the sky, etc. Mom and Glenn got her this dinosaur egg that you submerge in water for a few days and it slowly hatches and then a dinosaur comes out. Mom set it up for her one night several weeks ago, and I really just couldn't believe how excited she got about it.

This is Day 1, she wanted to set it up on the kitchen table so she could watch the bowl and make sure she didn't miss any of the action.


Here's a video of her telling me about her dinosaur and what she'll do with him when he hatches!


It was almost 3 days before he hatched, and every day she would check on him first thing, do lots of talking about him and his progress, and was just amazingly excited about the whole process.

When he finally hatched, we came down that morning and she checked on him and his shell was completely cracked and he was in the water. She couldn't believe her luck!



Here is a video of her very carefully checking things out...



She decided he needed a bath and then a snack because he was hungry for some breakfast. She gave him some of the grapes from her birdhouse from Donna. She told me "the birds will share, okay Mommy?"



After giving him the royal treatment, she brought him everywhere with her for several hours and was really sweet and careful with him. But I guess she got tired of him because she dropped him off on the nightstand next to my side of the bed, and then she never wanted anything to do with him again! Poor little guy, but he definitely provided a few days of serious excitement in the meantime :)

Visit from Aunt Teresa

Steve's sister Teresa came to stay with us for a few days the weekend before Thanksgiving, and she came back for a night on her way home from visiting my sister-in-law Michelle.

As expected, Ella had lots of fun playing with her Aunt Tesie while she was here!

Showing off her dinosaur egg from Grammy (which really deserves a post of its own...)


Putting a puzzle together


And of course Ella required that Teresa spend plenty of time with her up in her playroom.




We all enjoyed having Teresa stay with us and hope she visits again soon!

Picture Post

Some pictures from the last several weeks -


Hiding in a laundry basket. She said "look at me in my cage!"



She asked me to take a picture of her and Nomar and she did many poses and wanted to see every picture after I took it. Nomar was not equally thrilled but still a good sport :)



Scrubbing dishes. She is now legitimately helpful with dishes and she rinses them and hands them to me to load up in the dishwasher. She loves it, I can't imagine ever being so excited about dishes but she acts like it's a reward. We're taking full advantage of it!



Steve and Ella walking their dogs. Ella insisted on bringing her toy puppy for the walk. (He also sleeps in a dog bed in her bed!) As you can imagine this walk was pretty short.



Big hug for Cory



Snuggle buddies



Looking so angelic with her purses.



Sleeping angel - I will never get tired of looking at her while she's sleeping, she is just too precious