Little Miss Verve

Since Elsie turned two, I stopped keeping track of how old she is in months, and then wasn't doing updates here, either. So, I've decided that I'm going to keep on updating just on E once a month, here, on the 7th of every month (or really close to it). I'm backdating this blog to put it on July 7.

So, Elsie is a hoot. She is full on toddler. She very often seems to be a caricature of a toddler, she's that animated. I'm just going to list some vignettes of life with her as the meat of this update.

*We normally have oatmeal and fresh fruit for breakfast. This last week Elsie almost had a meltdown because she wanted "Manoni cheese!" for breakfast. It took me a minute to figure out what she was talking about. I just want to say that we've never had Macaroni and Cheese for breakfast, but that I might go to Kroger and invest in the Easy Mac bowls that are fifty cents each right now if you buy ten (normally $1 each).

*She's learning names really well. It's freaky what she's remembering, who she's remembering. She knows all the names of her friends at church.

*We read a book or two every night when putting her to bed. Dmitri the Astronaut is in the circulation right now. Never read it? That's because it's not very good, but she loves to point out the "as-roh-not" on every page, and then squeal at his little friend "Wuwu." (Elsie doesn't do the L sound right now.) There's also a picture of a man in his bathing trunks and she loves to point to him and yell, "Naked!"

*Her memory for books is increasing daily. She'll crawl up into the rocking chair with Goodnight Moon (which we've been reading nightly) and start reading it to herself. It's very amusing.



Sometimes I will find her with Baby Bear, Baby Bear, or Brown Bear, Brown Bear, saying "What do you see? I see...and then gibberish." One of those books (Polar Bear, Polar Bear or Panda Bear, Panda Bear) has a walrus in it, so no matter which book we're reading she frequently guesses WALRUS! excitedly.

*She likes to throw everything out of her crib so that she can use it as a bounce house of sorts. I went in her room the other morning and said, "What are you doing?" and response was "I jumpin the moon!" I laughed. In Goodnight Moon there is a picture of the cow jumping over the moon. She remembered and connected. Crazy!

*She's a pro at my iPhone. And that's not really a good thing. She figured out, through watching me do it only, how to press the home button and slide to unlock, so she turns on my phone regularly. She rearranges my icons and deletes apps. I couldn't find the "Phone" icon the other day because she moved it off of the bottom menu. Her favorite apps are "Dress Chica" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", with "Paint'N'Wash" coming in a close third. These are all free of course.

*Elsie loves to sing. The songs that come in her daily repertoire include "Jesus Loves Me," "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," and the alphabet song. At appropriate times, she'll bust out with the Clean-up Song from Barney (she learned that at church).

Here's an example of her artistry, until she got distracted by my phone:



*We've been hosting dinner at our house on Mondays this summer and so we end up with a lot of 2-liters. She is obsessive about carrying these bottles around, moving them from one location to the next. From the stairs to the bench and back. From the table in the kitchen to the table in the breakfast nook. And then she counts them...inaccurately, but still it's cute.

Relating to Oscar, she looks out for him and makes announcements to us. "Ah-kur sleep." "Ah-kur wake." "Ah-kur seepy." "Ah-kur crying." She also likes to tell him "It Ehsie turn" when he has something she wants. When he goes to bed, she says "Night night Ah-kur" and when he's doing something she doesn't like, she says, "No, Ah-kur--No! No! No!" When he wakes up screaming, she puts a hand to her ear and asks, "Hear Ah-kur?)

Developmentally, she's got all of her basic colors and shapes recognized and enjoys pointing them out. She knows a lot of animal sounds, and particularly likes the ones that say "Raaahhhrrr!" Often, out of nowhere she says, "Mama! Raaahhhrrr!" She's a pretty good communicator, but there's still a lot of things that she says with such meaning, and she'll repeat them if we ask her to, but we still have no idea what she's saying. We say, "Oh, okay." This might come back to bite us later, haha.

Potty training is right around the corner. In the next couple of months, if not sooner. That's all I can think of for now, but I know there's more. Lots more. She keeps us entertained.

Cheers.