Life With Ella

Hi dad aka papa.  We love you so much and hope that you have a beautiful birthday.  Video will come later on in the day.  Can’t wait to see you!

The Borders Book Store across the street from our  house is closing.  They are having big sales – 20, 30, 40% off.  I was wandering through the store today and found some really cool stuff.  I found these two dry erase books for Ella.  One was for math and the other was for phonics.  Tonight, before dinner, I showed Ella the math book.  Ella is funny with her numbers.  She is not as confident with her numbers as she is with her letters (writing them).  This is a great book where first you count objects and then write the number underneath the photo.  When you’re all done, you pull the tabs and the numbers are revealed.  Ella loved this – she began to learn to write her 2 and 3 the correct way – not backwards.  Then she learned about adding things together and the last thing that she did was learn about even and odd numbers.  She was having so much fun with her math book.  She felt so proud when she got the correct answer and really wanted to learn about something when it didn’t make sense to her.  I love watching her learning process.  At one point after dinner, I was taking Towby out for a walk and Ella heard Stella and Juliet in the hallway.  Ella came to the door and said, “Hi you guys – do you want to come in here?  I’m learning about math”.  I love it that she wanted to share her learning with her buddies.  I’ll show her the phonics book tomorrow.  We also got her the “The Word Caper” this Leap Frog DVD.  She was watching it while we were eating dinner (we were watching the ballgame) and she was so into it.  There’s nothing like watching kids who love to learn.

When I went to pick up Ella from school today, one of the teachers told me that she fell while running on the pre school yard.  I went into the classroom and another teacher was putting a band-aid on her knee.  Ella was crying when she saw me. She was shaking and she seemed really sad or scared.  I held her and kissed her and told her that I was sorry that her knee hurt.  I told her that it would feel better one day.  I asked her if she was ready for ballet and she burst out crying saying that she did not want to go.  She said that she was afraid that her knee would hurt and I just didn’t want to force her.  She was very sensitive and I just wanted to support her.  She loves her ballet class so much and I didn’t want to put her through that if she didn’t really want to go.  She’s doing much better now and we’re making up the class on Saturday,  I’m tired.  Goodnight,

Ella woke up on Tuesday morning with a fever…not too high, but it was a fever.  The only other symptom that she had was a stuffy nose, but she’s had a stuffy nose since Thanksgiving weekend.  She stayed home from school on Tuesday and was just hanging around and resting all day.  Her low fever continued.  Same thing for Wednesday.  Today, I took her to the doctor.  Everything checked out fine – he didn’t think it was the flu, but he said that he thought it was a sinus infection.  This means that Ella has to be on amoxicillin twice a day for the next 10 days.  Ella told me that she wanted bubble gum flavored medicine.  I told her that it was going to be a liquid that she had to drink and that maybe she would want another flavor, but she insisted on bubble gum.  I should have never listened to her.  It took an hour of screaming (both Ella and me) to get her to take it.  Sunny finally mixed it in with chocolate ice cream and chocolate syrup.  What a nightmare.  19 more times to go!  I just want Ella to feel better.

Sunny and I went to a potty training class because Ella hasn’t shown any interest in going on the potty and when we try to have her be without a diaper, she is resistant. Ella needs to be potty trained by September 2, her first day of pre-school. The woman gave us a lot of good information and instructions for when we decide to potty train. Our target date is this Friday so we had to have our family meeting. This family meeting is a part of the potty training process. Here is how it went. We all sat around the table and lit a candle. Ella was very excited about the candle and asked if she could blow it out. We told her that she could blow it out after the meeting. We started off by saying this (what the lady told us to say), “Ella, we are so sorry that we didn’t potty train you earlier. You were showing signs and we didn’t pick up on them. Mommy and I made a mistake and we need to help you use the potty now.” We then took out a pile of diapers and said (the lady told us to say this too), “Ella these are are the only diapers that we have left. When all of the diapers are gone, you are going to have to go on the potty. Do you understand that? This means that on Friday morning when you wake up, you will not have a diaper or pants. You can wear a sun dress or tank top or tutu, but you will not have a diaper.” Ella looked at us and said, “Then I will go on the potty”. We could have ended it at that, but we did one more thing that the lady told us to say. We told her that diapers cost money to buy and so do things that Ella likes to do like watercolors and we told her that we could only buy one of those things, not both. We asked her if she would rather have diapers or watercolors and she said, “Watercolors and then in a little while, you can buy me a computer.” We both had to stop ourselves from laughing. Anyway, it went pretty well. Ella did a great job listening and blew out the candle with great pride at the end. We told her that on Thursday night, she could take all of her potties and put them wherever she wanted them in the house. We will give potty updates daily.

Today was a gloomy, rainy cold day.  I didn’t even take any pictures.  My mom and I drove out on the highway with Ella to take her to a carousel in a mall in NJ.  That is true love.  The important first was that Ella was eating broccoli tonight and she was really into it.  She was just shoving it into her mouth and chewing hard and all of a sudden she started crying.  We looked over at her and she bit her finger thinking it was broccoli.  Grandma asked her if she bit the broccoli and her finger and Ella looked over at her, still crying, and let out a big, “YES”.  Poor baby.  She had a big tooth mark on her finger.  She quickly recovered after we put ice on it.

Another different thing happened tonight.  First of all, Ella actually fell asleep at 8:45 which was incredible.  As I was putting her to sleep, I turned off the light in her room.  She began to cry and said, “no dark, no dark”.  I quickly turned on a little light in her room and that seemed to do the trick.  It’s so great that she is able to communicate to us.  Ok – hopefully tomorrow will be beautiful and I’ll take lots of pictures.

Only 2 more days for Sunny to get here.  Would you please hurry up?????  We love you & miss you like crazy.