Big Girl!

In just a few weeks time, Miss Eleanor has transformed herself from a baby to a little girl. It's alarming how quickly this went. Yes, obviously she's still a baby, but.... she looks and acts like such a kid sometimes and it kinda blows my mind.

Example: her eating. Ellie loves to feed herself and has quickly mastered the art of picking something up and shoveling it into her open mouth. She wants real food - none of this pureed nonesense - and wants to feed herself. Needless to say, when we let her, we have a serious mess on our hands, but it's worth it to see how happy it makes her - not too mention she is so cute when she tries to pick up little pieces of chicken or cheese or whatnot. Her favorite foods are venision and chicken, which I think is kind of hilarious. Thanks to Grandstan's (yes, that's Grandpa Stan - we've shortened it) hunting endeavors, she's got enough venision to last quite some time. Ellie sits with us at the table on an awesome little booster type seat (mamas to be, take note! This is what we use instead of a highchair. It works so well for us, and has the added bonus of being totally portable, which is awesome).

also, she loves Starbucks!

Ellie's sleeping has turned the corner recently for good as well. We had it SO great for the first 5 months; we purposefully avoided telling other new parents how well our baby slept. She'd go down at 7 and sleep til 6 almost every day, and did this completely on her own, with no "sleep training" from us. At 5 months with her first sickness she regressed and it's been a battle since then. Every night we'd go to sleep wondering which baby we'd get that night. We tried having her cry it out, which didn't really work for anyone and all sorts of other techniques. In the end, it seemed like she always had something new up her sleeve - another cold coming on, teething, growth spurts, etc... We settled on a routine but it seemed like it frequently got interrupted. Until a week ago when we really doubled down our routing efforts, and it's been smooth sailing since. Granted, it's only been a week, but the last time she went a week sleeping through the night was in early October, so we'll take it. Her routine (dinner, bubble bath - aka "spa time" - lotion time, book time, sleep) has worked so well that last night she showed us how well she's learned it. Peter was in her room getting her ready for her bath and she was literally on all fours lunging for the hallway to get to her bath. Literally, as he was pulling her diaper off, she started speed crawling her sweet little nakie bum down the hall, where she paused, turned to him and smiled and then turned right and crawled straight into the bathroom beelining for the tub. Seriously, SO funny.

Spa Time!

Which brings me to crawling. She's mastered the art of crawling quickly, pulls herself up on absolutely everything, gets into anything within reach (meaning we have had to start enforcing the word "NO" over and over again) and is constantly on the go. This little girl plays from the moment she wakes up to the moment she goes back to sleep. I'm sure this kind of activity doesn't hurt with her getting such good sleep lately! She loves her toys, she loves to play with grown ups, she babbles and talks constantly and is just such a sweet addition to our family.

Girl is quite clever. This attempt at "babyproofing" lasted ten minutes before she "un-babyproofed" it