Ellie has recently begun singing independently and I love hearing her versions of the songs that we sing.
“Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” is a current favorite of hers. This is crazy to me because I hardly ever sing it to her – basically,we sing it once a week at playgroup. (And that is a good reminder why I probably shouldn’t even bother trying to get her to talk like me!) This video is from about a week ago. She now adds in a few more words (like, “sky”) but the substance remains the same.
“The Itsy Bitsy Spider” is also a favorite around here but we rarely sing it with the word spider in it. Generally, we sing about a very small Mama, Baba, Ellie, Baby, Pappou, or Yiayia. It’s much more fun that way!
Ellie’s Yiayia knitted her a new hat (which she wears almost constantly now, even inside) and also made a tiny hat and scarf for her baby doll.
This has invited lots of fun conversations about how we all have hats, noses, mouths, and eyes.
It also means that Ellie wants to nurse with me, with her hat on, while she nurses her baby, who is also wearing a hat. So there is a lot of nursing and hat wearing going on around here!
Last night, we had dinner at the home of some friends. On the drive home, Ellie was asking to “go ‘ome” and it was so cute to hear her say that! When we got home, I said, “Ellie, are we at church?” Her answer was, “No, ‘ome!”
Ha, ha, silly Mama.
Just a few minutes later, though, Nik heard her talking to herself, saying, “Church? No! “Ome!”
As in, she was retelling the joke! She’s growing up! She tells jokes! So fun!
Yesterday, Nik took charge of roasting our almost-19-pound turkey. He decided to use the braise/roast method (as illustrated here on Michael’s Ruhlman’s blog). It was, hands down, the most amazingly moist and delicious turkey we’ve ever had. We’ll probably never roast a turkey any other way again.
But where’s the turkey on, you ask? That’s part of the beauty of this method – you carve it, put it in a Dutch oven, ladle some broth over and heat it well before putting it on the table. So it stays hot the whole meal and you can have hot turkey whenever you want it!
Not only did Nik roast the whole turkey, but he did the dishes, many times over, all day. So yes, he’s amazing!
And while we’re at it, here’s a few more pictures of all the other delicious food we made.
Ellie’s five-year-old cousin, Alex (the one in Alaska who’s a girl as opposed to the one in Virginia who’s a boy) gave Ellie this little skirt when we were there in April. It had been her favorite skirt that she had worn for a long time and she wanted Ellie to have it.
When she handed it to me, I noticed that it was size 12-months and as I opened my mouth to say something, my sister-in-law, Katie stopped me and said that Alex was still wearing it and that it would probably fit Ellie too.
It turns out that when you’re two and don’t wear diapers, your thighs and bottom are much smaller than when you’re 12 months and now the skirt fits. Thanks Cousin Alex!
Entire outfit: styled by Ellie
“Hi! I’m two and this is the best smile you’re going to get.”
Nik and I have had a relatively easy time in the “how shall we parent?” department. By relatively easy, I mean, we haven’t had a lot of conflict in our “deciding what parenting philosophy to follow”discussions. Putting all of that into practice is, of course, a work in progress and we do always make mistakes. Thankfully, though, we haven’t yet had to attempt to reconcile two very different ideas of how we want to raise our children.
Recently, however, we’ve come across two problem situations.
Case #1: “Pee” vs. “pee-pee”
In potty-training Ellie, I found myself using the words, “pee” and “poopie”. Nik chose to use “pee-pee” and “poopie”. His version really makes more sense (at least he’s consistent with his endings) but regardless, for some reason, it feels silly to me to say “pee-pee” when I can just say, “pee”. At first, Ellie didn’t use any of those words, but now that she’s started talking, she’s chosen to use Nik’s word and if I say “pee” to her, she says, “No, pee-pee” as if I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Case #2: “Ouchie” vs “boo-boo”
When Ellie gets hurt, I like to use the term, “ouchie”. Nik says, “boo-boo.” Guess which one Ellie has chosen? Is there any doubt? If I say, “Do you have an ouchie, Ellie?”, she will, through her tears, say, “No, boo-boo.” I can even ask her, “What does Mama say?” and she’ll answer, “Ouchie.” But she won’t use the word herself.
HOW IS THIS FAIR? Who spends all day every day with this girl? Pretty soon, she’ll be succumbing to all the other crazy East Coast English quirks, like dropping prepositions from verbs of completion (“done lunch” or “graduated high school”) and using the incorrect preposition (“by accident”). Come on people, you’re done WITH your lunch and you graduated FROM high school! You dropped your milk ON accident!! If I can’t even get Ellie to use my terms when she hears me saying them all day, I know there’s probably no hope at all for keeping her from sounding like an East Coaster.
I guess that’s the price I pay for committing “until death do us part” to an East Coaster. But hey, at least we’re in accord on how to discipline our children, right? 🙂
This cranberry sauce (or perhaps more appropriately, relish) is so good I could just eat it plain, the whole bowl. There’s no cooking involved and it definitely isn’t traditional cranberry sauce but wow, is it delicious!! I found the recipe out there somewhere on the Web a few years ago and my apologies to whoever it is that I can’t give credit to. If you want to switch things up a little on your Thanksgiving table, make this!
Fresh Cranberry Relish
(recipe can be easily doubled if you want more and also made a day or two in advance)
1/2 of an orange
Zest half the orange and chop that. Then peel the orange and chop the segments.
1/2 of an apple, peeled, cored, and chopped 1 C finely chopped fresh cranberries ½ C sugar (start with less and add to taste) powdered ginger, to taste fresh lime juice, to taste
Mix all together with the orange and orange zest and let sit for a few minutes. No cooking needed. Stays delicious for days!
Grandpa bought Ellie a wonderful doll bed for her birthday and so I decided to make a little bit of bedding to go with it. (My dad bought the bed from this shop, which is based in Maine, and we’re so happy with it. It’s unfinished solid wood and really sturdy, which is great because Ellie likes to sit on it.)
I made a “mattress” stuffed with scraps of cotton batting with “sheets” from an old vintage sheet that I had.
I made a pillow, pillow case, and quilt from flannel scraps that I already had. This was the first log cabin block I’d made and it was a really easy and satisfying quilting project!the back of the quilt
Ellie was quite interested in this photo shoot so here she is helping me out!
To Ellie, her baby isn’t sleeping unless the blankets are competely covering the doll’s face. So yes, there is a doll under there, you just can’t see it.
This summer, I posted about all the talking that Ellie was doing. Between then and a couple weeks ago, Ellie basically stopped learning new words. Not only did she not add any more new words to her vocabulary, but she stopped saying many of the words she had been using and she wasn’t even willing to mimic us to try any new words. We’d ask her to say a new word and she’d just look at us as if to say, “I’m fine the way I am. No thanks.” We stopped even trying to get her to say anything new.
We weren’t worried about this, knowing that language acquisition is a gradual process that every child approaches differently. Plus, she’s only 25 months old. We knew that in her own good time, she’d start talking. I do confess to a lot of curiosity though as to when exactly her desire to talk more would kick in and start the talking train.
In the last couple weeks, the floodgates have opened and the words are flowing out! She has started copying us in almost everything we say. This morning, I told her I needed to turn on the printer and she said, “Printer”. She’s started identifying things by name – things that we haven’t explicitly taught her the words for. This, in particular, is a miracle for this ESOL teacher. Language acquisition is so much easier when you’re a baby than when you’re in middle school!
Within the past few days, she has started using almost all of the color words, including, as you’ll see in this video, gold. GOLD! I expected her to say yellow when I asked her what color Pooh was and she said gold instead (which is what the book says but still).
“Bath” and “sunset” are new words too that emerged when we made this video!
Salmon and Souvlaki 