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.

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: