18 Months

Once again, I can't believe Ellie is already 18 months old. She is so much fun and I'm so glad she is part of our family. We had her check up on Friday, Dec 9, 2011 and here is how she measured in... 22lbs 12 oz(27 percentile) and 33 inches long(86 percentile). Dr Horkley said she is a tall and skinny little girl and very healthy. It will be interesting to see if she keeps up with being tall or ends up short....average:) like me. She did awesome at the Dr appt and talked and played with Dr Horkley. He gave her a book and she was so nice and said thank you....over and over:) She does have a little rash that started a week before the appt. It started on her knee and has slowly moved up to her tummy and her arm. It is mostly on the right side and hasn't really been red at all, but I wanted him to check it out. He said it is a unilateral rash(I can't remember the whole name) but it is nothing to worry about. It hasn't been bothering her at all and isn't contagious. He did say that it could last up to 4-6 weeks and hers looks really mild, so it may get worse:( I am glad that it is nothing to worry about and especially not contagious. Here are a few things she has been doing.

• Ellie loves to play with phones. She loves to send text messages and jabber away into the phone. Here she is one night texting grandma's with daddy. She would tell us all of these things and then point them out and then start texting. November 7, 2011 Here she is again at Grandma Judy's house texting again. She cracks me up at house focused she is when she is sending a text. November 26, 2011
• Ellie is a huge helper. She always wants to be doing whatever we are doing. She likes to throw things away for me and will usually take her dirty diapers to the garbage. I have found that cooking dinner is extremely hard because I don't want her helping with really hot things. A solution I have found is to let her play in bubbles at the sink. She LOVES it! I will give her a few utensils and she is good to go. One night while Patrick was doing dishes, she insisted on helping him. He let her wash her own dishes:) November 10, 2011 She also likes to help when I put grocery's away. She really just likes to rearrange the fridge and take all of the stuff from the door and put it on the bottom shelf. November 23, 2011
• She likes to read books and has even started to sit through the books at night or before naps and have us read them to her. She will also just sit and flip pages and read to herself.
• Ellie likes to play hide and seek. Even it she doesn't quite get the concept....she's funny. November 20, 2011
• She loves being with family. Here is one of her with Uncle Eric. She adores him and will call his name over and over when we are at there house. Eric was actually the first name she said too:) Don't mind his hair, he was in Phantom of the Opera and this was the morning after. November 12, 2011
• Ellie really likes to put toys into things. She has a little purse she carries around that she loads her little figures into. She will spend a lot of time taking them out and putting them in. She has also found that she enjoys loading up everyone's shirts with her toys. As many as she can fit in. Here she is one night filling up my shirt. November 17, 2011
• She has started more and more tantrums. She will throw her self down or fling herself back if she is being held. The thing I don't like most about this is that she will hit her head on the floor, or smack herself:( I talked to the Dr about it and he said it is perfectly normal. I hope that part doesn't last very long especially since everyone keeps warning me this is only the beginning of tantrums/
• She enjoys painting/coloring/drawing. Here she is painting on this cool watercolor paper. It has all of the colors on the bottom of the page and you just get it a little wet. November 29, 2011 We have really been working on only drawing on paper. It is a work in progress:)
• Ellie loves her stuffed animals. She has to have Monkey, Kitty and Minnie in order to go to sleep:) it cracks me up because she will give them all kisses, constantly. She also has these little figures of Minnie Mouse, Pooh Bear, Tigger and Piglet that she kisses. At night, I have to also give all her stuffed animals kisses goodnight.
• She still like shoes. She has found that big shoes are even more fun. Sorry it's blurry, it was from my phone. November 29, 2011
• She has really started to play make believe more and more. She will put two animals together and make them talk back and forth. She has a shapes puzzle that she is really good at and will dump them out and put them back together. She has a couple other puzzles with animals and they are a little harder to fit in. But, she is getting better at them.
• Ellie is saying so many words. A while back we counted over 50, and I am sure there are way more now. She is putting some words together. The other night she had put her sippy cup into a pitcher and it got stuck. She came up to me and said, "Mommy, it's stuck." I was shocked. She hasn't done too many other things with three words, but I can tell it's coming fast. She says oh no fall or oh no dropped. All the time, but oh no is kind of one word. She will also say whatsat? It is so cute the way she says it and I have to just hug her every time. It's most commonly said when the neighbors shut there front door:)
• She likes baths again. December 7, 2011 I will say lets go take a bath and she runs to the stairs and is ready. She will play for a long time and the last few baths I have had to drag her out since the water is all cold. She loves bubbles in the bath. She also has discovered laying on her tummy in the bath and thinks it's hilarious. She will kick and splash with her hands and also blow bubbles while on her tummy. This is awesome, because she went through a stage of not liking baths at all and that was really hard. Especially having her hair washed was a really hard thing. Now she seems fine with it. December 10, 2011 Her hair is getting so long too. I had to take this picture to show. December 10, 2011
• She has learned how to take her diaper off and the other day I left her downstairs watching a cartoon and ran upstairs really fast. She came up a couple minutes later like this reading a book! November 29, 2011 It was so funny(probably because there were no accidents) She will tell me when she has gone to the bathroom and has told me a couple of times before. My mom got her some little undies and we are going to get a little potty so hopefully she will get used to the idea and want to potty train.....soon....but probably not too soon:)
• Ellie also likes little chairs. She will carry them around and loves to have something her own size.
• We started her in nursery 2 weeks ago and she did really great for the first time. She made it almost the whole time and then wanted to go back in after a few minutes with us. Today, was not so good. Our ward meets at 11:30 and it is right during nap time. I think it will get a little better when our time changes to 9am.

Well, we are having a great time watching Ellie learn and grow. She is growing way too fast, but it is so much fun to be a parent.