Ellie

This girl cracks me up.

My sister Tara said it perfectly on a recent blog post: "This girl has the cuteness of Callie and the antics of Jackson. It'll be amazing if Hillary and Jeremiah can keep their sanity with a 4th!"

Callie & Jack have been copying each other a lot lately. Without the older two starting it first, Ellie started copying Callie at dinner the other night. It amazes me that my 2 1/2 year old has the wits to do that. But then Callie said, "Mom! Ellie's copying me!" And Ellie copied back, "Mom, Callie's copying me!" Can you believe it?! Her sense of humor, or the fact that she has such a sense of humor & is capable of teasing her older siblings at such a young age is crazy to me. Does everybody else's kids do that too?

Ellie is potty-training & is doing fantastically well! I casually started a couple weeks ago, even though she's shown hit-or-miss interest for a while. Last Wednesday we were going to be out of the house all day so I had her in a pull-up (aka diaper) and I wasn't a good mom & didn't ask her a million times if she needed to go potty & she never told me she needed to. So obviously she was soaked when we got home. I changed her & we went to a friend's for a get together & Ellie did end up coming to me about 45 mins before we went home & saying she needed to go potty. Way to go Ellie! We got the kids home 2 hours past bedtime (on a school night!) & put them right in their beds. Ellie even slept in her clothes. So total 180 the next day. She woke up around 6:30 & came in saying she needed to go potty. That was a first, and guess what? She was dry! Amazing! She also stayed dry all day long (wearing panties) and has been dry since then - morning & night! I can't believe our luck! I think we'll be having a big girl party this weekend!

Yesterday at church I was taking her potty & when she leaned forward for me to wipe her she didn't reach out to hold on to me and I hadn't assumed wiping position quite yet so she did a total face-dive right on the tile floor! So funny sad! Luckily she had hardly peed since I had to pick her up unwiped & comfort her. The whole right side of her face was all red. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I saw the actual damage:



This morning as I was emailing my missionary brothers Ellie came up to me like this and said, "My brain is this big":



She's learned that from Callie. So then I asked her if she knew where in her body her brain was & she did this:

Yep, her brain is in her butt. She also sometimes asks if the baby is in my boobs. For as smart as she is about many things, she's a little confused about her brain & babies. She insists she has a baby in her tummy too (oh, she does recognize most of the time that the baby's in my tummy), and she'll say her baby's hungry as she has a snack. That is not immitative behavior. That is just my 2 1/2 year old being stinkin' cute!