I thought it was time I dedicated a post to our littlest and cutest member of the family, who is growing at an alarming rate and somehow getting cuter and more exasperating every day. When Ella was an infant I can remember asking anyone who I thought might give me an answer, “When will this get easier?”, and more than one person told me that it never gets easier. As soon as you master one challenge, another unexpected one rears its head, and that continues all the way through adolescence and early adulthood. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they told me, you’ll find yourself sometime in the near future longing for those days of trying to comfort an inexplicably crying baby in the middle of the night in exchange for the completely unreasonable and illogical toddler who has taken that baby’s place.
That little pearl of wisdom is proving true for us. In some aspects, our days are so much easier now than when Ella was a baby. Now I can actually get a few things done during the day in those moments when she’s happily entertaining herself. She’s mobile and can communicate now, which is a definite improvement on constantly having to guess what was wrong, but as she becomes more independent, the fits become more baffling. One assumes that if an infant is crying, there is some tangible thing that they need and when they get whatever that is, they will be comforted. One should just throw that assumption right out the window with a toddler. There is often absolutely *nothing* wrong, but that is no reason not to throw an epic 45-minute screaming and kicking fit.
Despite the frustrations that come with living with a toddler, there are far more happy moments than sad, and more achievements than setbacks. Although she’s a total firecracker, Ella is incredibly polite, and she melts my heart every day with her cute little pleases and thank-you’s and no-thank-you’s and ‘scuse me’s. She’s also quite expressive, and squeezes her tiny arms around my neck at least once a day and says, “I love you, Mama.”
Our most exciting Ella news of late is that she is potty trained! WOOHOO! She's still using her little potty at home, but isn't opposed to using a regular toilet when we're out and about. We've taken several trips away from home with her in underpants, including an entire morning at the zoo, and I'm so proud to say she hasn't had a single accident and is great about telling me when she needs to go. Her only slips in the past couple of weeks have been at home when we're outside, but that seems to have passed. (Thank goodness, because I was definitely not cool with her dropping trou in the middle of the driveway to pee...) Although she still wears a diaper at night and at naptime, they are almost always dry when she wakes up. It was a bittersweet moment putting her diaper changing pad in storage in the basement. I so clearly remember when she was so tiny she could practically swim on that changing pad, and now she doesn't even need it anymore.
Ella has an insatiable thirst for learning, and I’m constantly amazed at how quickly she’s picking up letters. She knows at least 10 letters now, and is starting to learn their sounds. “F says ‘fuh, fuh, fuh’,” she’ll say. Perhaps the most surprising part is that I really haven’t been trying to teach her letters because I assumed she might be a little young for that. But she picked up “W” on Sesame Street one day, and the floodgates opened. She started pointing out every “W” she saw, on street signs, in books, and on TV. When I realized she was interested, I started to point out other letters, and she has picked them up incredibly quickly. Now she’s even making out letters in her own scribbles and paintbrush strokes and delighting in her seemingly magical ability to “make letters”. I do hope this is a precursor to a life-long love of reading and learning, and that she keeps that thirst for knowledge.
Thanks in large part to Wah Wah Jill, Ella absolutely loves pretending, and wants every inanimate object she comes across to “talk”. When playing blocks, she’ll pick up one block, declare it the mommy, and get a smaller block to be the baby. “I want them to talk,” she’ll say, directing me to play the part of the baby block. She loves bugs, flowers, and birds, and wants to know the name of each new one she sees. Surprisingly, she actually remembers the names, and rather than calling a bird, “bird”, she calls it a robin or a sparrow or a dove or an owl, and so on. She knows the names of all of the bugs we see regularly, and names each flower in our yard.
I’m so grateful for the opportunity to be with Ella each day and to share in her little victories and discoveries. My adventures in motherhood thus far have taught me that although there will always be challenges in parenting, it is so important to appreciate the time we have with our little people in the present. It’s impossible not to think about how much better it will be when they sleep through the night, or are finally potty trained, or whatever the challenge of the day happens to be, but I am trying my best to be aware of the treasure that is Ella’s childhood while she’s still a child, rather than wishing it away in hopes of easier times. I hope I will look back at this entry someday when an impossible teenager has replaced our precocious toddler and we’re longing for the days of two-year-old hissy fits about nothing, and remember those soft little arms around my neck and that adorable small voice telling me she loves me.
The gorgeous photos in this post are courtesy of Kelly Bennett, one of the most talented women I've known. Our experience with her was magical and I couldn't recommend her more highly. You can find her and more of her work at www.kellybennettphotography.com.
