Some recent gems from Ella -
After a trip to the playground with a friend, we were on our way home for lunch and Ella asked me what we were going to have for lunch. I gave her a few suggestions which I guess were not appealing, and she said "Mommy, let's go eat lunch at a restaurant. I want to go with you to a restaurant and have a lunch date." We went and got pizza, how could I say no to my first official lunch date request from her! :)
Her stamps from Happy feet are really hard to get off, much harder than any other stamp, I don't know if it's the kind of ink or what the issue is, but they are exceptionally difficult to wash off. A few weeks ago after scrubbing Ella's shins for several minutes each I said "do you think maybe next week you could skip the stamps and ask for a sticker instead?" I forgot about it and never mentioned it again. Fast forward a week and the next week of Happy Feet, I asked her how it went. She told me "it was good, and I got a sticker, no stamps!" I just couldn't believe it. I told her how proud I was of her and she said "thank you Mommy, I did a really great job getting a sticker." That was about 3 or 4 weeks ago and now she gets a sticker every week!
She turned off all the lights in her room, came up to me with her glow man night light, held it up to me and said "I see your face, it's blue. You are a robot - a scary robot!"
We were praying before dinner and I prayed for Steve's Dad, who just had a hip replacement. As I said that, Ella, hands clasped and head bowed, says "And Grammy." Me: "Yes, and Grammy"; Ella: "And Aunt Erin and Cory". Me: "Yes, and Aunt Erin, and Cory." Ella: "And Me!" Steve: "In your name we pray, Amen" :)
One night I told her that I needed her to turn around and sit down so I could brush her hair. She was really excited and hyper and didn't want to sit for her hair to get brushed. I asked a few times and she wouldn't do it and then finally she said "say 'little dinosuar, it's time to brush hair' [side note: she likes to pretend she's a puppy, dinosaur, robot, and we're supposed to call her 'little puppy', 'little dinosaur', 'little robot', etc]. So, I figured, okay, I'll play along if the little dinosaur will sit still to have her hair brushed. I said "Little Dinosaur, it's time to brush out your dinosaur mane!" Her response: "I'm a little dinosaur, I don't want to brush hair, I just want to run around!" Ha - foiled by my 3 year old!
On Valentine's Day, I got Ella dressed for the day in a long sleeve pink shirt with hearts, and brown pants. She acted really surprised and said "brown pants?? NO, I need pink pants!" I said "we don't have any clean pink pants" and she said "Ok, well purple then." I said "I don't know if we have any clean purple either." She said "we do, look in my drawer." Well, she was right, she had a pair of purple leggins in there. While I was getting her changed I asked her why she didn't want to wear her brown pants, and she said "I like pants that are better. Like pink and purple."
One night I was talking to my Dad on the phone and Steve was finishing tucking Ella into bed. After I got off the phone, I went upstairs to give her one more kiss. She told me that her nose was stuffy and I saw that her humidier was off, even though I thought that I had left it on. I asked her "did you turn off the humidifier?" she said very seriously, "yes, it was too noisy. I wanted to hear you talking on the phone!"
It had been a long time since we've gone for a walk with Chris and Laurie, and we had been planning to get started again now that the weather is getting nicer. For the past few months, whenever we have taken walks in the neighborhood, Ella just walks alongside me, she doesn't ride in her stroller, so she hasn't been in her stroller in a few months. I wanted to get a practice stroller-ride in ahead of time so that I wouldn't have a rebellion on my hands the next night when we were going to go on our walk. Ella decided she wanted to ride in her umbrella stroller but I really thought she seemed too big for it. But, she was pretty adamant that she wanted to ride in it so off we went. About 20 minutes into the walk I was talking about how tomorrow night we were going to go to Miss Chris's house to walk with her and Dominic. I asked her if she wanted to bring that stroller, or her other (bigger) one, and she told me "the other one. This one is too small. I'm too big girl for this stroller. We need to pack it up." (She knows that we always 'pack things up' once she outgrows them!)
I always tell Ella I love her so much, more than anything in the world, and I always ask her "How much do I love you?" and she says "so much in the world" (not quite 'more than anything in the world' but she's definitely got the gist.) One morning I asked her and she answered and then she said after thinking for a few minutes, "how much is so much?" Another time I said how much I loved her and she said "tell me so much in the world."
Ella was in bed the other night and called me upstairs sounding very upset. When I got to her bedroom she said "Mommy, I don't like this book anymore." She had a Thomas the Tank book and said "There is a scary dog in here." I asked her to show it to me and she turned to the 2nd page and pointed to a dog looking into a window. I have no idea why it was scary all of a sudden to her, she's read the book a bunch of times and she usually likes it. I asked her if she wanted me to put it back on the bookshelf and she said "Yes, and we need to give it back to Grammy the next time." (the book is from Mom) Then she said with 100% sincerity, "I need to tell her it's not my favorite anymore."
We were in a parking lot and I was singing a few lines of a song that had been playing in the store we had been in. E: "What are you singing?" Me: "It's the song that was on in there - now it's stuck in my head." E (VERY concerned, and rubbing my head): "Mommy, how you going to get it out of your head? You need medicine?"
