Summer is half over!?!?

We had another fun trip to MN last weekend. We celebrated Kasey's 3rd birthday and Tori's 1st birthday and got to see many other MN family and friends. We did the night driving again with the hope Ella would sleep, which worked out well on the way there. On the way back we broke out the newly purchased portable DVD player and Diego video - not very conducive to sleep.


Ella is keeping up pretty well with her two big cousins. Wylie thinks she is cute and gives her lots of hugs. Kasey likes her pretty well, but definitely is a little wary of all the attention Ella gets from Wylie & everyone else when she is in town. It will be so fun to watch them grow up so close in age!


Tori (born premature last July weighing less than 3 lbs) is doing very well and actually is bigger than Ella was at 1 year! She is about to walk and is a crawling speed demon in the meantime. Grandma Joyce bought matching outfits for the girls, which they modeled at the park on Friday.


I forgot my camera on this trip, but JoLynn and Jocelyn shared their albums, which I posted off to the side.
Other than that, I have been working insane work hours, which explains the lack of posts (and sleep...and contact with the outside world). Summer is more than half over and I don't think I've had my fair share of fun yet.

Ella is the Green Triangle in her classroom (since they can't read each other's names), so we spend a lot of time talking about shapes. "Mom! The garbage is an oval!" would be a typical conversation starter around here. This week they are talking about primary colors, with today declared Red day and tomorrow Yellow day and everyone dresses in the color. So Ella continues to love daycare (though she quickly reminds us it's called Toddler Twos) and we love that she loves it.

We are working on shortening the bedtime routine, since Ella has been giving us a hard time the past few weeks. She still stays in her bed in the morning until we come and get her, but at bedtime she has been wandering out of her room. We also used a timer for the second time tonight, and she was pretty good about understanding that when it went off we were leaving the room. Last night she didn't get out of bed at all, but tonight she did come to the door to ask me to turn the fan on. So we will see if this continues or if its just because she is still catching up on sleep from the weekend!