Ella vignettes

The last little while this little girl has amped up her personality 100-fold. She has been so incredibly fun and funny. She lifts my spirits even when I am sure it cannot be done.  She is changing by the minute and everything she does is so amazing and wonderful to me. I don’t want to forget any of it. So here are a few of my favs right now.
When we say, “Ella do you want to say prayers?” she starts to mutter in a special “praying” tone of voice, she goes on and on and then she loudly cheers, “DAAAAAH!!!”(This is the “Amen”). When one of us prays she begins by folding her arms and bowing her head but her excitement soon gets the best of her and if I am holding her I feel her tensed up and looking at me, occasionally asking me in her special language, “now?” “how about now?” as she waits for the cue to loudly cheer, “DAAAAAH” (Amen).  She absolutely loves that this makes us all laugh. She lives for an audience.
She is very busy all around the house. Her newest obsession is the spice cabinet. Sometimes she even spices up the floor a little bit by sprinkling it with some seasonings. Here she is, caught in the act.  I love how she laughs..like “oh isn’t this funny? Your spices poured on the floor?! “ because she knows that will get her out of anything.

Yesterday she encountered a darling little girl her age at church.  This sweet little girl was actually a little smaller than she was.  This was very confusing to Ella. She is used to be the smallest person in the room. She is used to being fawned over.  Even her little friend Keira who is just a few months older (but she can walk!) takes a maternal air around her (with which Ella is comfortable and familiar). So this indifferent little person was new for Ella. She was totally lost and unsure of her place in this situation. And so she approached the little girl as if she was a dog. As if she were Shemly. She put on her sweet, somewhat patronizing “talking to Shemly” voice and opened and closed her hands very hesitantly in a very close to her body wave.  But watching her, you could see the wheels turning and you could tell that she KNEW that this little creature was not a dog or an animal of any kind. But she was also not like the other adoring big humans she knew.  She was indifferent to Ella. She was going to be a different kind of challenge.

Eventually her little friend broke the ice by helping herself to some of Ella’s cheerios and then they were pals. And Ella was giddy! They had shared a moment! She had cracked the code! You could tell she felt so cool, scootching around with her new pal, sharing cheerios. Showing her how to put cheerios between her toes (this is one of her new favourite past-times) It truly was the cutest,most hilarious “figuring out” I have ever seen. Babies are so FASCINATING.

Recently she has taken to calling us, “MA!!” and “DA!!” “GRAY!!” (for Gracie). She will call us until we look her way, and then launch into a very serious, very detailed and animated conversation with many intonations and changes in facial expression, as if we are all on the same page, and we totally understand everything she is saying.
Today when I walked into the room after she had been hanging with her sibs for a while she saw me and did a little dance round and round. Right there on the couch. Bouncing on her bottom like a little wind up monkey. Apart from being wonderfully acrobatic and hilarious, it made me feel so loved! Today when Aaron brought her home from her walk she saw me and got so excited, she kept straining to look behind her as I pushed her stroller and when she saw me there, she got a satisfied happy little grin on her face and settled back down into her stroller as if all was right with the world. Every chance she gets lately she reaches out to me and gives me a huge bear hug. She sighs happily as she does this and coos softly and sweetly in this high pitched voice into my ear saying, “mmmm…ahhhhh”. While she does this she pats my back gently. It is heaven.  No better feeling in the world.
When she sees the camera flash she quickly stops what she is doing and poses (oh so very naturally) like so:


Here is a coy moment in daddy’s arms.

She continues to scoot at crazy speeds and nothing deters her, rough pavement, scratchy grass, splintery wood. Nothing slows her down. She is a blur. Here she this evening,  helping her siblings to catch fireflies


And really, HOW cute are these (bigger) little people?

I love their matching intense expressions here. Oh these yummy little faces!

I will be so sad to see the end of the bum scootch era but when she experimented with tooling around with this little walker the other day…well that was impossibly cute too. She was so thrilled and proud of herself. ( And I must admit I look forward to her little legs being spared. all the splinters and scrapes)

Also? Suddenly she loves shoes. Overnight. From screaming if we just brought them near her to bringing them to us and begging us with sweet little “uh uh uh’s” to put them on her.  How cute are those fat little feet in sweet little shoes?  Aaaaaaaahhhhh.
I have said it a million times before. I adore the newborn stage, I can never imagine anything being more heavenly. But without fail, every stage after it passes I think, “wow, this is the BEST ONE YET, nothing can be more adorable than this”.

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