Like Mother, Like Daughter

So Andy's dad graciously watches Ellie 1 or 2 days a week while I'm at work.  He comes over and they play and then I come home.  And it works out great.  He gets to hang out with her, she gets to hang out with him, they take LOOOOOOOONG naps on the couch together, and she's all wound up and not a bit sleepy when I get home.  So really it just works out mostly great.

This past Thursday, when I got home from work, Ellie dearest was not a teensy bit sleepy.  But she had already played with ALL of her toys that morning, so she was completely unimpressed with them by the afternoon.  Basically, I was running out of things to do with her to keep her occupied.  She's not the kind of kid that will just sit nicely and play or sit nicely and read a book or sit at all.  She's got to be moving and having something to do to keep busy.  So we went downstairs  and had a little photoshoot.

Same piano and everything.  It was my grandmother's and she taught piano lessons on it for years and years and years.  As the music teacher in the family, I inherited it and now teach lessons on it every week.  It's very special to me.  And it makes me so happy (and a little weepy, to be perfectly honest) to see my daughter sit at it and play just like I did so many years ago.  Here are some other favorite pictures of mine from that afternoon...

Ellie also wanted to remind you that we are in the final hours of our Thirty-One party!

Look how much stuff it can hold!!

Hop on over here and get your order in before it's too late!  Just click on 'place an order' and then 'shop now' next to my name (hint: I'm the only Heather on the list!) and have fun shopping!  If you spend $50 or more (before tax and shipping), you will be entered to win a $20 Thirty-One gift certificate and the odds are still looking pretty good!  Also, if you're local, you can save $4 on shipping by selecting 'ship to hostess' and visiting me sometime to pick up your order rather than having it shipped directly to you.  Seriously, this is some good stuff, so go pick out a gift for someone you love or, even better, something nice for yourself.  You deserve it!

We had a super amazing time at Fall Fest last weekend and Trick-or-Treating last night.  Then this morning, Ellie's Great-Grand-Pap came for a surprise visit!  He just happened to be at a woodcarver's show down the road and so he called and they stopped by after they were done.  So it's been a busy, but really fun time so far in October.  I'll have more pictures for you sometime next week, but probably not until I do our 10 month update.  Wait, did I just say that??  10 Months?  Double-digits?!  Nope.  I changed my mind.  It's not happening.  I am cancelling all further Month-days.  No growing up for you.

9 Months Old!

This month has just flown by!  Ellie will be 9 months old as of 7:47 this evening.

(modeling her beautiful Ghanian dress from Miss Sarah!)

Actually, today she is exactly 39 weeks old.  Which means that she's been in my arms longer than she was in my stomach (which was 38 weeks and 1 day).  I can't believe it.  Yesterday I was out shopping and saw a three week old baby and thought he looked SO SMALL, but really he wasn't any tinier than she was at that age, she's just gotten so big over the past 9 months.  We go in on the 15th for her 9 month check-up and shots, so we'll see then how big she actually is.

  

Over the past month, she's gotten much more mobile.  She's not walking yet, but she's so so close.  She pulls up to standing on anything that will provide enough resistance and walks along the side of anything she can.  She will even transition from object to object in order to keep walking.  And she no longer falls down when she's done standing, she does a very controlled sit.  She is into everything.  Even the stuff that we've tried to keep out of her reach she finds some way to get to.  

(this is our VOIP phone system that Ellie loves to play with.  If you leave us a message and we don't call back, she deleted it.)

It's ridiculous.  And constant.  I can't even brush my teeth without having to chase her away from something or pull something out of her mouth.  At least she's started to enjoy the pacifier now so that's a good way to stop her from chewing on everything.  

Speaking of chewing on things ... she still has a total of zero teeth.  She goes through phases where she works on the one that you can see RIGHT THERE under the gum, but it hasn't broken through yet.  This is about 4 months that she's been working on it.  4 months for one stinkin' tooth.  Crazy.  I'm almost expecting it to pop through as an adult tooth with all the drama that it's causing!

She is really into eating, too.  Like, REALLY into eating.  She loves food.  Of all kinds.  We haven't tried something yet that she didn't like.  And this month we tried vegetables!  Peas and carrots, so far.  I basically get one new food for her each time I go grocery shopping, which is every other week.  Today she had some more applesauce that she actually liked.  I found (at Aldi!) cups of no-sugar-added applesauce.  The ingredients are just apples and water, just like homemade, but I don't have to actually peel and core and cook and mash the apples myself.  Fantastic.  So anyway, they're 4 ounces each and she ate the ENTIRE THING this afternoon!  We couldn't believe it.

Ellie had some pretty exciting times this past month, though.  For the first time, she was a guest at a birthday party!  Her second-cousin Luci turned one in September and we got to go over to celebrate.  She had a blast playing with all of Luci's toys and seeing everyone.  She wasn't too thrilled about the party hat, though...

She did enjoy sitting in the grass and having some deep conversations with the birthday girl...

And their neighbors to the back have quite a few animals, so Grampy took her back to meet the turkeys...

It was a really fun, cute party and it got me thinking that I need to get started planning Ellie's!  There's only 3 months left and there is a LOT going on in there, so I really better get to work now.  I have an idea that I'm pretty set on, but her Daddy isn't so sure it's 'appropriate' for a one-year-old.  Humph.  We'll see who gets their way. 

Speaking of  Daddy, we also celebrated HIS birthday this month!  

He turned 28 just a few days ago.  Ellie also made him a super cute card with her hand prints on it.  Yeah, that was a fun project.  I'm just glad that I had my craft table set up to work on it!  SO much easier than trying to lay everything out on the floor!

Here's a few more fun pictures from our 'monthday' photo shoot this morning.  I let her run around her room while I picked out her clothes and got everything set up and this is the mayhem that ensued:  First, she wanted to pull books off the bookshelf and look at the pictures...

Super cute, but still a mess to clean up.  Then, she wanted to do this...

... pull the socks out of the basket, un-pair them, and throw them all over the floor.  Don't you just love that smirk?  How come she's so cute when she's being naughty??  I had to put the camera down and put a stop to the 'fun' when she started going after the diaper pail.  Sorry deary, you cannot unpack that one.

Anyway, we have a lot of fun stuff coming up this month.  Our church camp's Fall Festival is happening in a few weeks and we're heading off to that.  It will be Ellie's first time at the camp where her Mommy and Daddy met, fell in love, and got married.  It's a pretty special place to our family, so I'm really excited to take her there.  

We'll also celebrate Ellie's first Halloween!  Halloween is one holiday that was never huge in my family.  We were allowed to dress up and go trick-or-treating, but our costumes had to be 'nice' - nothing scary or spooky - and we didn't decorate.  I mean, we decorated for FALL, but not Halloween specifically.  It was a nice compromise, I think.  So Ellie's going to dress up and we're heading to a local state park for their Halloween in the Park event.  Basically, they open up the camping area and the campers decorate their campsites and families can come in and go trick-or-treating there.  No cars or streets or questionable houses to worry about.  Plus, it's designed for families, so I won't feel as weird about taking a baby.  There's also hay rides and food and a pet parade for pets that dress up and all sorts of other fun stuff.  I think it'll be a good first-Halloween experience for us.  We got her costume (as a hand-me-down) this week, so now I'm extra excited to see just how much cuter she can possibly get!

New Toys and A Trip to Grandma & Pappy's

So, what's the next best thing to a thrift store?  A huge multi-family yard sale setting up just down the hall from your office, that's what!  And that's exactly what happened to me last week.  It was glorious.  Every day after work I would walk up to the Fellowship Hall (I work at a church) and stroll through the dozens of tables, scoping out all the new goodies that were put out that day.  Most people say 'junk', but I say 'goodies.'  Granted, a lot of it IS junk.  But when you have a chance to go through it before anyone else, you get to cherry-pick the items that are worth something to you.  So that's what I did.  And Ellie made out like a bandit!

First, we did buy something brand new last week that has revolutionized our life.  And I'm not over-selling it.  It's called a Super Yard.  Basically, it's these panels that snap together and then flex at the joints so you can put it into [pretty much] any shape you want.  They're tall enough that babies can't get out, but short enough that grown ups can easily step over.  We set it up in the dining room (since we don't have a table in there right now) so that she can hang out near us while Andy works on banking in the kitchen or while I'm cooking dinner.

 It works like a charm.  Ellie loves it because there's enough room for her to crawl around, but we're not always chasing after her and telling her what she CAN'T play with.  We love it because it keeps her contained!  And Maggie loves it because she can finally relax because the bald monster can't chase her.

My father-in-law refers to it as a baby prison, but I prefer to think of it as a zoo.  You know, it's for the preservation of her species.  Just don't feed the wildlife...

So, back to the yard sale... The first thing I found was this cute crib toy.

We decided to use it out in the dining room pen.  It has a cute mirror on it that spins when you pull the cord and it plays music and the lights go and it's basically a baby-hypnotizing tool.

Plus, it's an elephant, and we love those around here.

Then, I found this.

Ellie's first camera.  I'm so proud.  Right now she just likes to chew on the strap, but someday soon I hope to see her running around the house, taking imaginary pictures of things.  The flash even flashes and the lens 'zooms' in and out.  It's freaking adorable.

I also found some [unopened] puzzles for when she's older.  One of them is Veggie Tales' Pirates Who Don't Do Anything and it's in a bottle.  You know, like a message in a bottle style?  Well, she was pretty excited about it...

And I got her a few coats for next winter and some nice shirts for myself.  All in all, we made out really well and Ellie is enjoying her new treasures.

On Saturday, we went up to visit my parents and attend a Spaghetti Dinner benefiting the Missions group that my dad will be traveling to Haiti with in February.  My mom made this new little gem for her to take to church and other places...

Isn't it cute?  The buttons are sewn on nice and tight, plus they're really big, so no worries there.  The zipper is just sewn on top, so it doesn't open to anything in particular.  The beads are really fun to spin and slide and, well, Ellie likes to suck on them.  And, the best part, the shoelaces!  Ellie loves to play with our shoelaces, but they're so dirty that I hate to let her.  It's great fine motor skills practice though, so this is the perfect compromise.  Right now she just unties them and then fidgets with them before deciding to suck on them, but that's ok.  Basically that's what the whole blanket is good for: fidgeting.

Hey, whatever keeps her happy.

My mom's cousin and his wife were at the Dinner as well.  They make these puppets and brought this one along to show my mom and see if she would like to have the pattern.  Well, bring a puppet into a basket auction full of antsy kids and you're bound to attract some attention.  Ellie was entranced, too.

One thing about "new" toys are the comments they've been bringing from various people (mostly older people from church).  I just don't know how to take them.  People will comment about how they never had a car seat or a high chair or their kids didn't really have toys.  And that's it.  That's all they say.  I really can't tell if they're just making an observation or trying to share and connect with me on a 'mom' level or if it's a quiet kind of criticism that perhaps my child is 'spoiled'.  Any thoughts?  And if you're someone who has actually said that to me in the past, please don't think I'm upset - I just honestly don't know how to react!

So anyway, what do you do with all these new toys?  Well, you carry them around in the diaper bag, of course!  Now I'm lucky enough that I received TWO great diaper bags as baby shower gifts.  My mom made one (that I linked to previously) and Andy's cousin and his wife gave us this one...

Yep, it's a 31 tote.  Now, I'm going to be perfectly honest with you here.  I resisted the 31 draw for a long, long time.  I have a natural distaste for anything super trendy, so since it was so popular, I wanted nothing to do with it.  But I was grateful for the gift and it just happened to be my favorite color.  When it came time to start taking Ellie to a babysitter every day, we started using the bag as a 'babysitter' bag.  Basically it stayed permanently packed with the supplies the babysitter would need and the other bag stayed packed with the stuff I wanted to have around when I was taking her out somewhere.  And I found that I actually did like the 31 bag.  We use it frequently now, since it is the ONLY bag that fits in the bottom of my stroller without falling over or being squished up.  And it just seems to hold a bit more than the one that my mom made me.  Don't get me wrong - I still use that one because I picked it all out and I love it.  It's just nice to have two very different ones so that I have ALL situations covered.

I tell you all that to get to this:  I'm hosting an online 31 catalog party from now (October 1) through October 27th!  It's really easy.  You just click here and you'll go straight to my party page.  Then click on 'shop now' and you're ready to go!  You can scroll through and see all the different products and pattern options and place your order right there.  Super duper easy.  If you know me in person and you'd prefer to look through a physical catalog, I have one of those I can let you see.  And Sarah, my awesome consultant (and cousin-in-law-in-law) set up some pretty sweet promotions, too!  Every customer who spends $50 or more before taxes and shipping will earn a chance to win a $20 Thirty-One gift certificate.  AND if my party total is over $300 before taxes and shipping, I will earn a $20 gift card to Target, which is pretty much my second favorite retail store of all time.  

So yeah, I'm pretty stoked.  And you should be, too!  Because these things make great gifts - for someone else or for yourself.  And did you know that Christmas is less than 90 days away??  Yup, it's true.  So get shoppin'!

And ps- if you're shopping for me, my favorite color is purple *wink*