Finger Foods

At 9 months, I figured it was probably time for Ellie to try feeding herself. When I look at the ingredients on the back of the baby crackers, cookies, and "melt in your mouth puffs" of various flavors - there are tons of ingredients that Ellie hasn't had yet... wheat, soy, corn.... and not to mention the fact that well, it's a processed food. I've sort of...okay...I've completely turned into a health nut. Ever since I took an anatomy and physiology class, I've had health nut tendencies, but now working in the medical field and seeing cancer on almost a weekly basis, I'm a health nutso. I can easily break into a lecture on what refined and processed foods are doing to the overall health of our society, but I like to get to bed at a reasonable time tonight. ANYWAY, back to the subject of finger food, I decided that until I've tried to expose Ellie to each ingredient individually (checking for possible allergies along the way), I'm just going to stick with cut up fruits and steamed cut up veggies for finger food. So far, we've done bananas, pear, mango, cantelope, carrots, and cauliflower.

This video was the second attempt at finger foods with bananas. The first time I chopped the pieces too small, so she couldn't pick them up and ended up just smashing her hands all over the bananas. So here is me giving her larger chunks that she can hold on to. Ellie has 8 teeth to chomp with now.

The next clip is when I realized I need to find a happy medium of how small to cut up the chunks. Her teeth bit off a little more than I thought they could.

This last clip was today, after a week of practice with finger foods. I thought this was pretty funny.

For some reason, perhaps because I'm reading the Harry Potter series, Ellie spitting out the cantelope reminded me of Ron spitting up slugs... only Ellie was smiling in the process.

Easter dress

I don't know who created this tradition that on Easter every little girl gets a new little dress to wear to church on Easter Sunday. I remember getting excited to wear my newest frilly dress to church and my dad taking pictures of me and my sisters on Easter morning. Elliana is very blessed to have a cousin, Madelynn who is 2 years older than her and so she gets wonderful hand-me-downs. I got this dress from Merinda, my sis-in-law, and Madelynn never wore it -grew too fast - it even had the price tag still. It's a darling dress; so this was Ellie's frilly Easter dress that she wore to church.

I think she's starting to get sick of being dressed up and tortured with my photo sessions. At first, she wouldn't smile for me at all. She even looks like she's getting a little sassy attitude in this picture:And then Daddy came in....I've become boring old mom. She gets sooo excited when Daddy comes around. Most of the time I have to kick him out of the room if I'm trying to breastfeed her or put her down for a nap since all she wants to do is smile and laugh with Daddy. It's very cute.
This is sooo David's smile:
Some of you my friends have asked where I got those flower headbands. The pink one I got at my baby shower and it was purchased at a christian book store called Beehive Bookstore off of Meridian in Milton. I've gotten a few different colors from there :)

Happy Easter!

We got these cute bunny ears for $1 at Walmart. She was wearing them around the store and got so many smiles and comments that we decided to buy them. So of coarse I had to torture her with a photo session wearing the bunny ears. It's been unusually nice outside these past few days so she has discovered the backyard for her playtime. Every noise and fluttering bug was very alarming at first. She would scowl at everything and everyone around her. Even the sky - she couldn't look up at the sky with out blinking weirdly and shutting her eyes closed - and the sun wasn't evening directly shining on her since it was behind the house. It made me feel bad realizing how much of a hermit we've been staying inside the house so much. But thankfully spring and summer are approaching and we'll have to make outside playtime a regular thing.

I took these pictures during the evening about 30 minutes before bedtime, I couldn't get her to smile she would only give me one look:

"Why are we outside momma? I need to get ready for bedtime".

"Wait! You've have something ridiculous on my head again, don't you!?"

"Ah HA! I've got it. Why are you torturing me? It's my bedtime".

"It's a bird! It's a plane! No wait... it's momma hand waving spastically trying to get my attention".

"What's this? How come it's stuck to the ground. Mmmm... I can fix that"."Hurry, fast, taste it now while mom's distracted with the stupid camera".

"It worked! I was fast enough, mom stuck her fingers in my mouth to get the grass out, but I still got three pieces I'm chewing on... niener niener niener".

For my baby shower last year, my family got a swimsuit for Ellie and at the time we had the crazy thought that she'd be wearing 12 month clothes, oh say around 12 months old or so. But she's been wearing 12 month size since she was 7 months old. So unfortunately this darling swimsuit fits her perfected now but it's not exactly beach weather in April here in this state. So we might just have to go to the indoor pool so she can break in her swimsuit.



It's kinda funny how babies can look freakishly buff - check out her deltoids.

This is a video clip I took a few weeks ago, sorry it's kinda long.