Crabbiness Managed

It's the end of our week now, and thankfully it's finished better than it started. We had about 48 horrible, rashy, sleepless hours, and then Ellie slept 12 hours at a clip and woke up relatively rash free on Wednesday. We got to go to music class and spend the rest of the day celebrating Mimi's birthday.

Today we got to see the whole fam-damily at cousin Daniel's graduation luncheon. Ellie was a little overwhelmed when we arrived and refused to sit with Mimi, which broke her heart. Especially when Ellie was then happy to sit in her own chair and chat with Paw (I think it's because he was funneling french fries right into her piehole.) In the end, she did a lot of snuggling, and was very pleased to bring Daniel a "special mail mail" (ie: a card.)

We had dinner with Gigi and Grizz tonight, before they ABANDON us for a vacation. I kept telling Ellie tonight that I had an owie on my heart because Gigi was going away. Ellie is finally starting to understand the concept of owies, and the other day when she smacked me, I told her she'd given me an owie and she immediately started crying. Good news, I'm not raising a sociopath! She has empathy!

What else has Ellie been up to... she's continuing to pick up more and more words, and sentences. I wouldn't say that it's stuff that everyone can understand, but if you're around her long enough (and follow her hand gestures) it's easy to pick up on her little language. The funniest thing is how her statements come out of nowhere. The other day after her nap we were having a yogurt pouch (a tube of yogurt that I froze) and she starts petting the carpet and saying something like, "ha ha ee das" and it took me a minute until I finally agreed "yes, that's right, the hop hops do eat grass!" She especially likes exclamations, like "oh my!" and "oh boy!" and "boom ace!" the latter of which Tim taught her at the playground. The best thing about her is when other people are laughing, she will sometimes chime in with this huge fake laugh, like she gets the joke, and then we all start laughing even harder because it's this goofy little kid guffawing at something she doesn't understand. Her other favorite thing is climbing onto regular chairs, so that she can tell us whose chair she's sitting in (Sara's is her top choice.)

She also loves the doll crib, of course.

Oh, and the funniest new development? She will try to stand on one foot. And then she'll put her foot down and pick up the other one and say "other foot?" This is in addition to how she still stands on her tiptoes and prances around if you ask her to jump jump. I have to catch it on video soon - her dancing and jump jumping makes me laugh every time.