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.

Lazy Days of Summer

The summer is winding down in California, and the temperature seems to be, too. Lately, the temperature where live has been hovering around 85 (29 degrees Celsius) after an extremely hot July. It's been nice, and we often eat dinner outside, which Ella enjoys.

Nicki and I went to her midwife appointment yesterday and we discovered that the baby's head is down, so he's getting ready to come out. Hopefully it won't happen too soon, we don't want to be unprepared. Still, we're really excited about it and can't wait to meet him. He certainly is an active one so far, Nicki complains that his kicking and rolling around is pretty distracting.

We sorted through some baby clothes friends of ours gave us, from their eight month-old boy who has grown out of them. It occurred to both Nicki and me: Why is it that boys' clothes are so stereotyped? I mean, everything has fire engines and baseballs and construction tools on it, and good luck finding anything that isn't blue. It's like clothes are designed for parents to take their boys out in a public and say "LOOK HERE! THIS ONE IS DEFINITELY A BOY, WHETHER HE LIKES IT OR NOT." The poor kid doesn't know that he's supposed to like these things. What's next? Baby clothes for boys with pictures of sexy women on them? "HEY BOY! DON'T YOU GO GAY ON US."

I made a little mixtape for Ella - at least, that's what us oldies used to call a playlist (as in ipod) - that I burned onto CD of old Disney movie music, and it has since become a hit in the car when I take her to daycare in the morning. She refers to it as "Mickey Mouse" because the CD starts with the theme to the Mickey Mouse Club. You know, "Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me? M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E!" She also calls the theme to Winnie the Pooh the "fluff" song, because there's a line in there about Pooh being "stuffed with fluff" and she laughs hysterically whenever she hears it.

There's nothing like the sound of a two year-old laughing. It could make a troll happy.

Ella's new phrases

"Oh well..."
"It fits perfectly!"

Favorite trick: putting her Winnie The Pooh washcloth on her hand, and rubbing my belly with it, whereupon baby boy reacts by rolling and moving around - apparently this is hilarious!

First Zucchini

I went out to the garden last night, as it hadn't been watered in a couple of days, and lo and behold I discovered a good-sized zucchini growing on one of my plants. I was very excited. I've tried for two years to grow zucchini, and haven't had much luck, mostly because the bees didn't seem interested in my plants. This year we've had lots of bees, courtesy of the many bee-attracting plants we've planted in the garden, including one that was a gift from my mother-in-law. So I guess I have her to thank, sort of.

We also have a couple of yellow crookneck squash growing, too, along with eggplant (which I grew successfully last year), tomatoes and jalapeno peppers.

Ella's A Shutterbug

Ella took her first picture with our digital camera. She's always been a ham with the camera, as evidenced here:



That's our Ella, always putting on her best face. After this one, I believe she asked to see it on the camera's display as she always does, and she laughed hysterically at it.

Anyway, Ella took a picture of us and a garden hat that she made at art class, and I think it shows a sense of composition, don't you think? At least the hat is the focus of the picture.



Last night, I came home after getting my hair cut and Ella wanted to get her hair cut, too. Her hair has been growing slowly since she's been a baby and lately has been looking like Beethoven hair. Anyway, here it is (drum roll, please) - Ella getting her first haircut.



Actually, she let Nicki snip a few ends off. But then she went around the house saying, "Look at my hair. I look pretty."

Seven Months

Nicki is now seven months pregnant with our impending arrival, and we're very excited as the day gets closer. Everyone is doing fine so far, but Nicki has been complaining that little one is pretty active for a few weeks now. She's concerned that it's going to be a bundle of energy once it is born, but I think that it's just taking advantage of the new-found room in there, which it will soon lose as it grows. We'll see.

I also think Nicki is bigger than she was with Ella at this point. Here's a picture of Nicki pregnant with Ella a few days before she was born at 35 weeks, and you decide:

Our Camping Trip

All of us went to Montana de Oro state park over the weekend, a campground nestled in the mountains and near a beach, just outside of San Luis Obispo in central California.

Ella got her first experience sleeping in a tent, and she took to it like a trooper. We cooked out with our camping stove, tried in vain to make a fire with wood that was too green, and which we paid $6 a bundle for, and walked around the mostly full campground, full of families with children. The campground seemed to be populated mostly by friendly locals.

When picked out our campsite, there was a note left in the storage box attached to the picnic table. It was written by a family who had stayed there before us, and said that there was mouse named Toby who lived in the box. We were not to feed him or disturb him. I opened the box and there was a little nest inside, but no Toby. The next day, there was a mouse eating a long piece of grass from inside a hole near the box. I hoped it was Toby, but I never found out.

The highlights of our trip for Ella were seeing a large bird near our tent jumping around and pecking the ground. I never figured out what he was pecking at, but he did it for several minutes like he was on a trampoline and Ella was pretty amused. Ella was also fascinated by a rabbit eating grass in our campsite, and we all remained quiet while he ate so that he wouldn't be startled and run away. We also saw a bobcat cross the road as we came in, and the dad of a little baby came by to visit us the first morning, and he told us about a bobcat that slinked through his camp.

We went to the beach twice and Ella helped me make her first sand castle. She also picked up a collection of rocks and sand in her play bucket and took it home with us. At a beach we stopped at on our way home in Carpenteria, near Santa Barbara, Ella watched a boy dig a huge hole in the sand with quite a serious collection of digging tools, and he seemed consumed by it for hours.


We let Ella have a few more treats than she normally does at home (we're on vacation, after all) and she consumed her fair share. In Solvang, a "Danish" town north of Santa Barbara, Ella had a huge gingerbread cookie, frosted to look like a colorful dinosaur. After her "lunch", she enjoyed having me ferry her around on my shoulders and act like she was tall like the big people.


Outside of Solvang there's an ostrich farm, and for a couple of bucks you can feed them; they are about the most aggressive eaters I've ever seen. They also had Emus on the farm to feed. We thought Ella might be scared of the large birds, but she laughed while they pecked at the bowls attached to dustpans that contained the food.

I think the camping trip was a success. Ella fell asleep on the way home.