Ella's Greatest Hits (months 16 to 20)

Oops, just noticed I haven't posted on the blog in a month, sorry fans! I...., well...., I've been busy, just like everybody else, with probably the same excuses as everybody else, so I'll just blame it on being in Italy - I'm just ooooh sooooo far away and things are just oooooh sooooo much slower here, okay? Feeling sorry for me yet? Yea, I didn't think so...

Anyway, we have gotten busy with lots of different activities here in Italy, which is good, it's helping pass the time and get us more settled in here, I think. I've taken on the role of 'organizer' for the spouses group for the CE (civil engineering) squadron here so I've been busy planning & hosting potlucks, booking Christmas events and organizing some Halloween stuff too - total soccer mom life - woo hoo! At least it's getting me out and meeting more people, although 20 new acquaintances still do not equal ONE good friend who I can really talk to, but I won't give up my search yet. Any great tips on making new friends, ladies, PLEASE pass them along : )

On to the good stuff, what about baby, right? Princess Ella is doing fabulously, reigning over her new Italian kingdom - and by kingdom I mean of course, mommy, daddy & both furry kitties. Yes, she is totally the boss of us, and with all the chasing and squealing at the kitties I think they have also come to accept her as their new, albeit crazy, leader. As our new, crazy (but cute) precocious leader, she has been taking great leaps and bounds through her toddler milestones and with all the MOVING ACROSS THE GLOBE TO ITALY, I haven't taken the time to talk about just her - a.k.a, I've been so busy with my little "I miss Target" pity party that I haven't adequately recognized my exceptional daughter's incredible achievements!!! She deserves at least TEN whole posts all about her fabulousness but for now, I'll see what I can cram in right here in a few paragraphs : )

Hard to believe our little princess is now 20 MONTHS OLD! That's only 4 months from the big TWO! She still seemed like such a little baby when we moved, just 16 months old, a developing toddler, talking a little, just getting into things. And now, just 4 short months later, she seems on her way to being such a big girl. When we first got here, I think she spent some time going through the transition, her own way. There were no new words for a while, her play habits were the same, she still fit the same clothes, etc. Then, once we were settled in the house, it's almost as if she knew it was time, it was okay to resume her development, and in a flurry of activity she started doing all sorts of new things! Her little brain became such a sponge, she started soaking up new words, alphabet, numbers, shapes, it was as if everything started clicking into place. I wonder if her body & brain were just as absorbed with the stress of the move as ours were, and there was just no room for her to explore and learn, but once she felt safe and settled, she was able to relax and let everything in again.

The first was the alphabet, she has always loved the alphabet song and has several sets of alphabet magnets, books, etc. One weekend she was playing with the magnets with daddy and he asked her what one of the letters was and she knew it, and then another, and another. He called me into the room and said mommy, Ella knows her letters, did you know that? I was completely ashamed because I didn't know, how did that slip by me? How and when did she absorb 26 new pieces of information? It's gotta be the Sesame Street : )

Next was numbers, she liked the Baby Einstein "Numbers Nursery" video we borrowed from the library so I bought it for her. Actually, I shouldn't say she liked it, as much as she was COMPLETELY OBSESSED with "Numbers! Numbers! NUMBERS!" from the first time she saw it, she would repeatedly ask, plead and shout for "Numbers!" whenever she saw the tv. Maybe a future as an accountant? Anyway, she seemed to know the numbers 1 to 5 that they taught in the video from the first time through, and although they don't teach 6 to 10, she seemed to know those as well - thank you Count Von Count, Sesame Street is truly the sole educator of my child.

While her brain feverishly memorized all the letters and numbers she also mastered her colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, black & white (thank you Baby Colors book), as well as her shapes - circle, square, triangle & star (thank you shape sorter), still working on oval, rectangle and of course, dodecahedron : )

She is also becoming a master at crayons & coloring, something she was quite timid about for some time, as she would become unbelievably frustrated trying to use them because she would apply the pressure of a small ant and get no results, angrily wondering 'what the heck are these stinky waxy things and why does momma keep yelling when I put them in my mouth, chewing on them is clearly their only purpose!' We finally found her some larger, softer crayons (thank you grandma) and she finally figured out how to produce lovely scribbly colored marks. She is fond of coloring in a few old coloring books of mine (yes I've kept weird old childhood things like that), and she is even more fond of having you color with her, apparently coloring 'solo' is not very chic these days, but she is probably most fond of coloring right off the lines in the coloring book and onto the tile floor when mommy's not looking, eh, I think that'll come out, right? Whatever, we needed some decoration in here anyway.

Physically she runs circles round both me & daddy, literally, and of course, the cats. She has always been a typical girl, gentle & shy and not into raucous physical play but she is starting to break out of her shell a little with all the exposure to kids at the playgroups we've been attending on base. Before we moved here she had fallen in love with swings but not much else on the playground. Well, she clearly had just not met the right playground, I mean, hello mom, not all playgrounds are created equal. Those slides we'd taken her to in Texas could have been giant screaming toothy alligators the way she cried when we put her on them, but here in Italy all she has to do is catch sight of them on base and it's "Slide! SLIDE! SLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE!" For a while we had to ride down them with her but in the last few weeks she has taken to braving them all by herself, confidently climbing up and announcing her fun with a hearty "Ready... Set... GOOOO!" (thank you daddy) as she zooms down. I love her shy sweet nature but I love even more watching her explore new things and become so confident and assertive, it makes me feel like she can conquer the world, well, at least the playground.

Perhaps the most exciting of all has been her explosion of vocabulary. Everyone we see comments on what a talker she is right now, repeating nearly everything (really time to watch our mouths) and using her words so well to accomplish things. She had a wonderful vocabulary at 16 months, right on track with all her single words. Then, after moving, her first step was to string two words together, adorable things like "mommy hug", "cookie please" and the accidental, but I-will-never-live-down phrase "poopy daddy". This may have been the first two word phrase and it was entirely accidental, but daddy believes to this day that I slaved away, training her to say those two unlikely words. In truth, she was blabbing about "poopy" during a diaper change and suddenly asked for "daddy" and my mistake was to laugh and repeat it, alas, "poopy daddy" was born. I am proud to say she no longer utters this unspeakable phrase, although daddy is still working hard to get her to say "poopy mommy", ever my little angel, she still adamantly refuses to soil her mother's good name : ) Since those first few word couplings she has burst into multi-word phrases and without knowing it has said several completely grammatically correct sentences - "I see daddy" "More milk please" as well as many more wonderful, without grammar - "Ella sit chair", "Daddy sit big girl", which means daddy sit up like a "big girl", and I'm sure we all know how much daddy must LOVE that Ella lacks the distinction that daddy is a big BOY, not a big girl, ah toddler talk is so entertaining.

Even in her single-word vocabulary, she knows the words for SO many objects now and I wonder where she learned them. So many things from everyday life that we must have been talking about and labeling all along, and suddenly she will access that information out of nowhere and point and say "bicycle" in the store, and I look, and by god, there is a bicycle, how did she know that? I know she's seen them in books, but to make the leap to identify them in real life somehow astonishes me. I guess I figured for so long that she wouldn't recognize similar things unless they looked EXACTLY like they did in the books, but she can name animals like fish, cows, lions, elephants, in all different books and in real life, even though all the versions are different. To me, it's an awesome new concept that she can take books/videos/etc. right into real life, and vice-versa, this meshing of everything around her, it's like accessing a whole new quadrant of her brain. Ah heck, let's just skip all that grade school and send her right to college, right? She's a genious!

I love watching her learn and make all these new connections in the world around her. With her language skills she can talk to me about so many more things now. She talks to her toys too, recently doing a lot of new "modeling" behavior (I think that's what it's called). Taking her baby doll and saying "baby lay down" as she lays the baby down, even trying to share her food with her baby or a bear "Bear banana?" she says as she squishes the mushy fruit into the poly fur - "How nice of you to share Ella" I say encouragingly as I de-hair her nicely offered fruit. She especially loves to play with the 'vintage' Fisher Price Sesame Street playhouse from my childhood (thank you, thank you, thank you grandma). Even though there is no Elmo (gasp) she loves to play with Ernie, Big Bird, & Cookie Monster in the beds, chairs and truck, saying "Big Bird lay down", "Ernie sit eat" and "Monster truck, zoom!" Maybe all of this sounds mundane to you, but you really gotta see it, to believe it, it is one of the cutest things in the world to watch them play in this little minitiarized world, acting out all the things they know, smiling with their great achievements, or maybe just because it's fun to be the big boss for a change : )

Well, she deserved all of this devoted blogging eons ago, but I hope this catch up will suffice, and adequately bore you with my writing so I won't have to return for another month, full of more excuses about my equally busy life. Again, love to all our friends and family, again, we still miss you all terribly and again, you are ALL welcome to come visit anytime. We've been working on capturing more Ella-in-action on video and have a new full tape for me to sort through so I will hopefully have some new clips to post soon, hopefully also actually displaying some of her new achievements so I've got some proof to back up all my blabbing. For now, here are some totally hysterical pictures of Ella walking down the hall in daddy's combat boots (literally, his military issue boots), in the last one she looks like she's doing a drunken frankenstein walk, it was hard to even take the pictures I was laughing so hard as she walked towards me saying "Daddy boots, Ella walk, daddy boots, Ella waaaaaaaaaalk!"...