What Ellie is up to...

I realized in my last post I did not really update that much on Esella! She is 10 1/2 months old now. CRAZY! She has 4 teeth (2 top, 2 bottom) and two top ones on the way. We still exclusively breastfeed, meaning Ellie has never had formula (and the couple times we tried to give her some, just in case we would need to one day, she refused it! Ha ha). She eats some organic baby food, but rarely, until the last few days, would she eat more than 1/3 or 1/2 a jar at a feeding. The last couple days she has been eating almost a whole jar at lunch and dinner! YAY!! I was afraid I would be breastfeeding this kid in middle school! (ha ha...joke people).

Ellie took her first independent steps 2 weeks ago, with daddy of course! She has been trying and trying to take steps, but tends to fall after 2-3. So she has been "bear crawling" a lot these days!

Ellie loves to push her little walker toy around, play with a train toy of hers, and LOVES her stacking cups! Other favorites include cell phones, remotes, shoes, water bottles, pulling books off shelves, "helping" with the laundry, and chasing the cats around the house. Ellie also LOVES music. If a song comes on the TV (a commercial, or a performance) Ellie will stop what she is doing ans watch and listen. Just this morning Good Morning America was on and Ellie stopped playing to watch a performance. Maybe we have a future musician??

You would think that with her mommy being a speech therapist, that she would be this brilliant talker already, right?? Ha ha ha. Yeah no. Ellie still has not said a real word yet, though she babbles up a storm. She learned how to clap about a month ago, and now waves too! We are signing to her as well...and she has signed "milk" but not in the correct context yet. I can't wait until she starts using the signs! Right now we signing for water (she LOVES water!), milk, and more, though I also tend to sign all kinds of other things too...like cat and dog, and all the animals in her books. I can sign the whole Brown Bear book, so we do that one. I also sign colors to her, and some verbs (like jump).

Why are we signing to her? (My professor asked me this Wed night). Some research coming out on signing to hearing babies indicates a correlation to higher vocabularies, more advanced language, and even higher IQ'a later on. Of course, there are many variables to consider in these studies (i.e. parents education level, level of engagement with the child), but a great reason to sign is that it gives your child the opportunity to communicate to you before they have the motor skills to speak to you. Children develop the gross and fine motor skills to sign well before they acquire the skills for articulating speech....so signing to your baby provides them with a symbolic system for communicating.

And...it is fun!!! :)

And NO...signing to your baby does NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT delay their speech development!!!! If anything...it will only enrich their language.

So anyway...that is what Ellie is up to these days!

And now on to some pictures! I have been trying to play with my camera more. I just LOVE taking pictures of children. Here are some pictures last week at the park by our house.

Ellie LOVES to swing!!


Ellie crawled across the playground to get to the plane. Her grandpa would be so proud!! (If you do not know, my dad was a pilot. When I was a kid we had an airplane! How many people can say that? Ha ha ha. My parents had all the cool toys when I was little, actually). Here she is riding the plane with daddy!!

Happy Birthday Ama!

WOW has it been a while!! We have been busy busy here. I started back to work part time in September, and started back in school so I have just been doing so much I forgot to blog!

I guess a little update? Like I mentioned, I went back to work in September after having 10 months off. I am just working two days a week at a local school district- This is a new job for me. The hours are awesome and the caseload is perfect. I see preschool aged children only from 8:30-1:50! Then I have time for meetings/prep/paperwork. While I am at work, Justin's parents, Ye-Ye and GrandB, watch Ellie, and will also be watching CJ when Melissa (Justin's sister) goes back to work. For the most part, I am enjoying work. I have the CUTEST little ones on my caseload! Including two sets of twins...and one set is identical twin boys! They are seriously the sweetest boys.

OH and you may have caught that I am back in school? After being in school for 8 years you would think I would be done! Ha ha ha. Well, I am working on getting my certificate in Applied Behavior Analysis. I plan to eventually become board certified in this area in addition to my board certification in Speech Pathology. Applied Behavior Analysis is the study of the analysis of a supject's behavior in order to modify it (that is a very simple explanation). It is a very effective method in modifying and shaping the behavior in those with developmental disabilities, especially in Autism. It is an area I have been interested in for a couple years now. I am taking a series of 5 classess to get my certificate. I will be done at the end of June. To begin board certified I also need to get a great deal of supervised hours in the field and take the board exam. SO it will be a while before I am done!

Lets see....Justin continues to work his booty off at his job!! He has been with his company now for 4 years in November. His commute is going well...most of the time it is not too bad.

We are loving our new house and the last week I have been trying to get more unpacked! We still have a few boxes left in the garage.....mostly "office" stuff which I am sure I will be able to purge a great deal! I have been slowly hanging things on the wall....though we still have more things to put up. I just hung up many pictures of our family on the stairway wall. Including pictures from last weekends birthday celebration for Justin's grandmother, Ama.

Last weekend we celebrated Ellie's Great Grandmother's birthday. The whole Yeh Bay Area fam way there. It was a good time. Here are a few pictures from that day...

Ama with her two great grandchildren!! Ellie and CJ
4 Generations....
4 generations.....
Cousins!!!

Ellie sat with her Greatgrandma as we sang Happy Birthday!Well....I think that does it!! I will try to get blogging more these days!! Love you all!!

Wordless Wednesday...

Randomness

So here I am going to post about a couple random, unrelated things. Ha. First....

Isn't she just so darn cute??? :)

OK....onto other things...

Today, in the RIDICULOUS heat, my wonderful husband installed Ellie's "big girl" car seat. Remember my post about www.diapers.com? Well they did it again! they had $50 off Britax car seats. Well geeze, $50 off, no shipping and no tax? SCORE! I ordered it the other afternoon and it was here about 24 hours later!

Unfortunately it was a little tricky to install and Justin came in drenched in sweat saying some pretty un happy words about that carseat. BUT....after reading up he figured out the issue and...
There she is!

While I was taking the above picture our neighbor came over..I think she is like 6 or 7, and handed me a flyer advertising some cold juice for sale! So we headed down the street and enjoyed some conversation with the neighbors (have I mentioned that our nieghborhood is AWESEOM!?). While we were standing there one of neighbors looks at Ellie, who has hanging out on my hip, and says "Uh oh! What did she do?"

And this is what we saw

The little bugger got a bloddy nose! :( We are guessing from the heat. She didn't seem to mind though! We took a couple pics, cleaned her up, and then it was nap time!

Well..this concludes todays randomness post. That is all.

I Think We Visited Heaven Last Night

Last night we went to my friend Krista's wedding. She was married in the Los Gatos Mountains in one of the most beautiful places I think I have ever been. (Please check out their site...for my words and pictures will do NO justice! http://www.nestldown.com/) It was nestled down deep into the redwoods. The ceremony site was backed up to a BEAUTIFUL little lake and the reception area was in a large grassy knoll. I kid you not while eating dinner two dear trotted across the grass off in the distance. I would imagine it was what heaven might look like. Huge redwood trees, gardens, ponds, a camel and a minurature train.

Did you catch the camel??
Ha ha ha. this place had a little miniature house, mini labrinyth, and a mini train WHICH you can actually ride! I mean, when I asked Justin how many weddings do you go to where you can go on train rides...his response? "Not enough!"

Here is Ellie in the mini house in the minni chair
Here we are before the ceremony


And here is Ellie with Daddy on the giant butterfly

My friend Claire was there with her husband Paul and their adorable daughter A. A is over a year and a half now...will be two in December! Ellie loved A and kept crawling after her and another little girl.
Here she is giving Ellie hugs...so sweet!!
Ellie did GREAT at her first wedding. We all had a great time in this most beautiful location!

Generations and Generations

Last weekend was my cousin Jodie's baby shower. She is due in Sept with a baby girl. We are all SO excited!! The shower was fun...Jodie scored! Ellie had fun chasing the boys...literally. There were two little guys there and Ellie crawled after them, giggling and squealing with delight. She maneuvered around people, tables and chairs to find the boys hidden in the corner playing with trains and cars. When she tried to play with the toys one of the little guys said "No baby! No baby! My toys!". Ha ha ha. She also made another little baby cry but we won't go there...ha ha

Anyway...at my cousin's shower was my Great Aunt...that would be Ellie's Great Great Aunt! So Ellie got to meet her Great Great Aunt Mavis. She is my late grandmother's sister (father's side). Aunt Mavis seemed to enjoy the meeting!! Here are some pics (of course, I wouldn't post without a picture, now would I?)

This last one...Ellie is bouncing on my mom's lap (she LOVES to do this...but at over 20lbs ther person holding her can get real tired real fast!!). I am so thankful that Ellie got to meet her Great Great Aunt!!!

Photo Shoot

Some of you that know me know that I dabble in the arts. I am not an artist by ANY means but I really enjoy using my creative side whenever I can. In fact...as a child I went to fine arts camp every summer. I took music (ok...so I kinda went to band camp, ok??) the first year, then took Art, Photography, Drama, and then Art again. If y'all haven't noticed by the ridiculous amount of pictures I take, I like to take a picture now and then.

I blame my dad for this. He also likes photography and its an interest we have in common. I may not be interested in rebuilding a transmission or watching Nascar....but I like to take pictures.

So anyway...I love to play with my Nikon D80 and my favorite subject is my daughter! This week while playing in our couch-less living room (which is actually quite nice...lots of room for Ellie to play!) I took some pictures. I really have no idea how to use my camera but its fun anyway!! OH and I really don't know how to use Photoshop too well either so these are unedited (except a couple converted to black and white). ENJOY!

Ellie climbing over Daddy to get to one of her favorite things...water bottles!!

Laughing at Daddy :)
Pausing from crawling
Hi mom!!
With her prize
Laughing at Daddy again! (She thinks he is the funniest person ever!)
What??
On the move! After Brinkley!

Standing with Daddy
OH and later that day Ms. Quail here let me get super close to her! I did not have a telephoto lens here...I was using my 55mm lens. It is really NOT an impressive picture people...I was just surprised she let me get so close!!
Hope you enjoyed our little photo shoot. Maybe someday I'll be as good as my cousin Jacquie!! ;) (For those who don't know, Jacquie is a photographer. And she is AMAZING!! www.bonviestudios.com)