Ella Turns 2

Some bits about Ella as she turns two:

She is a messy eater and refuses a bib - so she always eats topless.

She is so very good at self-entertaining. She is very easy going with a pretty long fuse before she gets frustrated. If she does get upset or hurt, she settles down pretty quickly. She has a long attention span. Basically, the stuff that makes her a pretty easy kid. She is a make-believe queen. Her favorite make-believe games almost always involve food. Her favorite books revolve around food, too. She loves an odd book I never really intended for her; it's called "It's Addition" and it has little rhymes about adding things like scoops of ice-cream and lollipops. But she's asked me to read it probably 50 times. So she often will say things like, "Mom, I have equals two pillows". Or "I want two plus equals three spoons" and other nonsense.

Last month she entered the "Don't look at me" and "Go away" stage. So funny. I could hardly believe it when one morning she even told Michael to stop smiling at her! I thought I still had a couple years before a kid might start with that stuff.
She's always begging me to play crack-the-whip with her in the backyard. I always feel like it is a rough game for her little body but she loves it and likes to be whipped around till she falls over.
She is as silly as can be. She teases me by pretending to offer something and then taking it away. She changes lyrics to songs in silly ways and then laughs her little head off. Like, "Ring around the Rosies, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all... climb on Mommy's back!", as she climbs up my back, laughs, and then demands a horsey ride.
She mixes up words in the cute ways that kids do. Spaghetti is said "spasgetti" and I love the stereotypicalness of it. She calls sunscreen "scumscreem", which always lightens my mood as she yells "BUT I DON'T WANT SCUMSCREEM!".

Bumper cars on her birthday. One of the great things about living in Israel is that they had no qualms about letting her on.

As she's finally outgrown her fierce attachment to mommy-only, it's cute to see the ways she bonds with dad. She has always been pretty resistant to letting anyone fix her hair, but last month she finally let Rob start putting in pony tails. So he is usually the one to fix her hair before church. It looks the way you might expect from a guy, but still totally cute and totally sweet that she likes him to do her hair.

"Look mom, I'm Papa in the Pail!" Her rendition of that picture in Dr. Suess's ABC book. (Related, if you know the book, Ella and Michael both call scissors "zizzors" because of the Zizzer Zazzer Zuzz.

She is silly and sweet, cautious and confident, independent but still loves to snuggle. Her nicknames, Peaches and The Sweetness, suit her perfectly!

She pretends to be a bird and calls Michael's football container her nest.

p.s. It cracked me up on the morning of her birthday when Michael was so confused that she hadn't grown up over night. The first thing he said when he saw her in the morning was "But mom, she's still a baby!" and then a steady flow of things like "why isn't she bigger now?", "why didn't she grow?", etc.