Well, our sweet princess is turning over a new, normal leaf...Miss.Independent. She's showing it even greater these days. Ellie wants to do a lot of things by herself these days. Hard lessons we have to learn here at the Gramkow household. When you do cross the street, you do have to hold onto mama's hand. Really? Is it necessary to drop to the ground like a noodle and throw a tantrum at the thought? Apparently, I'm learning at this age, tantrums are a bad temptation for almost two-year olds. And getting easily frustrated has greatly accompanied the tantrums. AND...can't having everything you want...and she can produce those tears so easily! Man, it must be hard being this age.
What's this 23-month-er up to these days?
1. Her hair is getting longer - finally the sides are growing in, but it's still borderline mullet-ish. I'm so ready for it to be past this stage! She rocks a pretty cute ponytail still. We get lots of comments about her pretty blonde hair and blue eyes.
2. She is my little shadow. She likes to be wherever I am, and will close the door behind her to "trap" us in. Currently, while typing this, door is closed in the office, AND she's sitting on the shelf under the desk and touching my legs! I guess this way, she's not typing on the keyboard. Oh, oh...someone's upset, TV Time-out. Ok, I'm back. Hit the head while trying to escape from under the desk.
3. She is really talking quite a bit lately. Now, translation to understandable English, well, that's a different story. Some of her common words are: mama, dada (although she has started calling dada mama...lol...guess it's payback for her saying dada first), down, milk which sounds more like "ulk" accompanied with the sign language for milk, wawa = water, cracker which sounds more like "cah-er" and is code for all food, accompanied by the sign language for eat, cheerios = shoo, shoo ( I know, it's a stretch), cow, moo, chicken = "chee-chee", Ellie, THAT, poo poo, diaper = "biper," eyes, nose, toes, legs, elbow, ELMO (loves Elmo even though we only have one toy that is Elmo...I wonder if kids really love Elmo because they can say it?), all done, shoes, teeth.
4. Colors - we have some mega blocks that we've started working on colors. However, everything to Ellie is Yellow or "lello" rather.
5. CHEESE! She now knows what the camera is and now says cheese. So smiles are harder to catch these days.
6. No. It's happened. She says no, but it's actually a sweet no, not a whiney no. It does make Ben and I laugh cause it's such a sweet no.
7. Swimming lessons were the past two weeks, and can I just say Day number one was BRUTAL. She screamed the entire time. And I have no idea why! We go to the pool all the time! It was seriously so hard for this former lifeguard/WSI instructor to see this behavior from my own child! She pretty much arched her back the whole time and was trying to wiggle out of my arms. It was at least a good bicep workout. By the end, she did get a lot better. She went UNDERWATER and can now hold her breath. Now the recovery is a little painful, but it's teaching the basic foundation. She would come up from the water and say "eyes" and point and "nose" and point. Poor thing!
Also one of the days after the first time going underwater she was like "all done?"
8. I can't believe my baby is going to be 2 in less than a month! Crazy how fast time goes by!
