1/2 Birthday, First Solid Food

January 15th was Ella's 1/2 birthday (and Elizabeth's whole birthday!). As Violet's mom knows, I love 1/2 birthdays. We celebrated with half a cake for us (no, there never was another half, I only made half a cake) and some banana for Ella.

It was her first taste of solid food. A little dubious I think. See for yourself. (This isn't the best video--the very first taste she had was a longer video blogger couldn't handle, but you get the idea).




On the other hand, she seemed to really enjoy the cake I made: she grabbed a handful as I made her pose for this picture. Oops.
By the way: the banana comic is by Natalie Dee. You should check out her blog at Nataliedee.com.

New Skills

The past month has been big for Ella. She's figured out a lot of new things. First, she now sits unsupported. She loves to sit up. But she's also on the move. Here are our favorites:

Rolling from front to back. Here are two videos of the first time she did it, on December 15th. The first video shows her getting from her front to her side. The second video, taken literally 1 second after the first video ends, shows her completing the roll. But don't blink, it's right at the beginning.




Now she does it so often, we don't even videotape it. Her favorite thing is to start sitting up, face plant herself onto her stomach, and roll to her back. She used to be stuck on her back, but yesterday she finally rolled from back to front all by herself. Of course, she wasn't wearing a diaper. I haven't gotten her to do it with the diaper on yet.

Pre-Crawling. On January 5th, Seth set Ella down on her hands and knees and she stayed up for a few seconds before falling forward a bit as one arm bent and then a little further as the other one bent. It gave the definite impression of forward motion. Here's a video taken a few minutes later in which she lifts her belly off the ground to go from lying on her stomach to on all fours for the first time by herself. Despite Seth's and my shouts of "you can do it!" don't wait for her to actually start crawling. Balancing on all fours is "doing it" at this stage.

Happy New Year!

A couple of months ago we were often up till midnight with Ella. In fact, in the early weeks we would go to sleep when the sun went down at 8:30 or so, but then we'd be awake again at midnight with her. We'd look out the window and see cars driving around and realize that those were people who were still awake and out and about! This past couple nights Ella's been snacking at midnight again, but I don't bother to wake up all the way or get out of bed.

So we didn't even consider staying up till midnight on New Year's Eve. At first, I was planning to go to Boston Common where they do fireworks at 7:00 (Greenwich Mean Time). But the weather was so ucky. Instead we had Kirsten and Elizabeth over for beef stew and croque en bouche (a tower of cream puffs filled with caramel cream and stuck together with caramel, yummers). We counted down to 7:00 and then went to bed. Here's our family self-portrait:

2010! Woohoo!

Christmas

Hi everyone! Sorry it's been so long since my last post. I have lots of stuff to post, just no time. So let me try to catch up.

We'll start back at Christmas, if you can remember that far back. Christmas was a blur at the time for me. We learned that Ella will no longer nap if there's something exciting happening. On the other hand, she slept straight through her first outing to get a Christmas tree. On Christmas day, I think her dress was even overstimulating. What do you think?

Looks like she was trying to eat it off. Mmm, christmas dress. Almost as good as wrapping paper.

You can eat it and wear it. So versatile. The holidays were busy and fun and full of family. Here's our family self-portrait from Christmas morning:This was the first time Seth and I slept in the same place on Christmas eve. We've always slept over at our separate parents' houses. So that was pretty cool. We weren't sure we'd get that much sleep with Ella, but we had a fine night's sleep. Better than any we've had lately!