A picture is worth one word

Ella is probably the most excited about the baby coming. She calls it "her baby", like Nicki is going to give birth to one of her dolls. And yet a picture can sometimes say less than a thousand words, in this case it says only one - joy. Despite the minor frustrations that occur day-to-day when you have kids, there is always that overwhelming sense of joy that runs through everything and you hope will never go away.



Ella is showing off her new outfit that she picked out herself, an ensemble that she felt was fit to clean the house in. She has a little broom and mop set that's become one of her favorite toys.

Although, I wonder whether her playing with it all the time is a comment on our housekeeping.

Ella the Artiste

Ella has been learning to draw people for almost as long as she hold a crayon. When she started to talk, she often requested Nicki and me to draw ourselves, or draw Ella happy or sad, or draw other people she knows. Usually, we made a simple drawing of a big, round happy face, and she wanted us to draw it over and over. I always figured she was learning how to do it, and soon she was practicing herself. The first drawings she made were completely unrecognizable as people, but we always praised her so as not hurt her self-confidence. Well, now she can make faces all by herself. Check her self portrait above. She drew it on our shower door with bathtub crayons.

Recently she started to get the hang of it, usually getting the head and the placement of the hair right, but then the eyes would be somewhere floating in space and the mouth would always be below the chin. Now she progressed to this pretty quickly. She also made a drawing of the yet unseen future baby:



Perhaps we have a little Mary Cassatt.... It's amazing how fast she learns things.