Working on It

Eliana has been working overtime around here, at being a toddler!



Seriously, Eliana has developed an interest in being part of the household and doing all of the things we do. She's not too proud to clean the floors, and has expressed interest in sweeping also! We let her know that she's exempt from chores until at least age 2.

She's even trying to carry a baby on her back: Last week when Marty was away, we went over to our neighbor's house for a playdate. Eliana was fascinated with the baby in the backpack, a little like the backpack that she often travels in on mommy's back.



We missed getting a picture of the baby on her back..she wore the baby on her back for a little while, but the baby was a little big for her.

One thing that Eliana has gotten into is mixing. Mostly she just stirs her plastic spoon around her plastic cup, but when we make eggs, we let her do some beating:



What happens after this photo is that Eliana tries to eat the raw egg...we keep telling her that you have to cook it, but she's so interested in putting everything into her mouth. We're looking forward to doing some basic cooking with her in a few months.

As mentioned before, our little girlie has gotten into numbers and counting a bit. We try to incorporate math into the routine. For example, Eliana LOVES cranberries and asks for them every morning as she's having breakfast. Now we ask her, "how many do you want?" This morning she said, "five. " We gave her five, she ate them, then she said, "More please." So we asked again how many she wanted, she said, "five" again. We counted out 5 more cranberries onto the tray. "More please." Again, she said she wanted 5. So she got 5 more, for a total of 15 cranberries, and we had to stop the math lesson to prevent a stomach ache.

Eliana is also very interested in the mechanisms of things. I tried to capture something that I see her doing a lot these days, opening and closing the "seatbelt" on her high chair. She likes to close it, then asks us to open it, then she closes it again...



But lest you think we never got out, we were out a lot this past weekend. On Sunday, Eliana had swimming lessons, then came back for a nap. In the afternoon we went to the park, and then took her to get new shoes (she's size 4.5 now!) , then to frozen yogurt. Eliana was pretty into that frozen yogurt:





Remind us to order a larger size next time.

Eliana is pretty delicious these days, continuing to surprise us with all of the wonderful things she does. We'll share more soon.