Catching Cold and Other Silly Details

Ella's been sick the last few days. Again. We're not sure what's wrong with her, but were suspecting a return of her seemingly chronic sinus infection... until I seem to have come down with it. Now I suspect it's just a beginning of the season viral thing. Luckily, it's not swine flu! Sheridan has been hit hard lately.

Anyway, I'm feeling overwhelmed with life at home, sickness, potty training, dog training and the normal day-to-day tasks. I keep thinking I'll have some time to sit down and blog about more interesting things, but the time never comes...

Here is Eleanor, taking over the puppy's box as usual. :) Both of them are growing like CRAZY! Eleanor has recently started using two word sentences such as, "Hi, Daddy" and "Daddy work?" She is also learning loads of new words every day. We have to be very careful what we say around her because it almost always comes out now. Sometimes I make very reactionary comments like, "Eeew. Gross!" when dealing with the dog... and thus, Ella's vocabulary has grown to include a lot of "icky"s, "yucky"s and "gross!" Not my favorite.

Oh, and the dog does have a name: London. She's had a name for a long time, I've just slacked on letting y'all know.

With potty training and the advent of sicky snuggle time, Ella has gotten a lot of reading in lately. This is a very fun development! She now knows many of her books so well that she's named them: "Bee-Bo," "Blanket," "Potty," "Ni-ni Horsies," "Horsies," "Apple," and "Amen." (Their actual titles are "The Belly Button Book," "Jesus Loves Me," "Time to Pee," "The Big Red Barn," "Horses and Ponies," "Colors and Shapes," and "The Baby Bible." We love seeing how she is connecting so many ideas in her little head and conveying them to us through her discriptive words.

Eleanor has also begun to show a great interest in Jesus and praying. As soon as we sit down to eat anything she says, "amen, amen, amen!" It is wonderful to have her so excited to pray with us and good to have a present reminder as to just how important our example of prayer is in her life. I think yesterday alone she asked me for "amens" at least 8 times - all through the day at different tasks. She is also very interested in my Bible. For a while she was calling all books "Bible," but has now realized mommy's purple book is the Bible. She'll sit on my lap in the mornings while I do my Bible study and ask, "God?" and "Bible?" It's hard to know just what I should be sharing with her now, but we do a lot of talking about God and Jesus loving her, helping her get well and wanting to hear when she is both happy and sad.

Wow. Now that I sit back and re-read what I just wrote I realize we've had a lot going on in our house. It was feeling like I haven't done much, but I guess it's good to have a reminder every once in a while that just focusing on our family is doing a lot. :)

The other thing I just finished (until a friend brought more apples to me today) was canning our apple butter. Yum! So, all y'all better watch out for Christmas 'cuz it's coming your way! Sunday alone I canned 24 half pints and there were already jars on the shelf!