Exercising and exercise socks

Occasionally I get up and exercise with a DVD in the morning. If I am doing aerobics, I put on socks and shoes. Lately, Ellie has been getting up and wanting to exercise with me. After one of these exercise sessions, Ellie tried on my socks. They fit much differently on her than me. For the rest of the morning, she walks around the house kicking her leg and saying "size".

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Keeping Ellie busy...and mommy sane

A little, active, curious one year old can't just sit around the house all day with nothing to do. After hours of running around and getting into anything and everything, she needs some sort of organized task... or at least the mommy does. So, I have been trying to do more intentional things with Ellie. Like making a necklace. Above Ellie is wearing her friend's necklace that was left here... but she is holding the necklace she made... all it took was a trip to the bazaar to buy some beads, and some thread... I held the thread and needle and she helped me put the beads on. Note to self, don't get so many "beads" with sharp edges (like stars and diamonds) next time. Below, Ellie is wearing the necklace.
We have kid friendly markers that a friend brought from the States. It's so awesome that with one simple swipe they wash off! Above, Ellie is making markers kiss... half the fun of coloring, you know...
Exploring the box is also part of the fun... taking the markers or colors out and putting them back in.
In the above picture, can you tell which parts I colored and which parts Ellie colored? I have fond memories of sitting with my mom and coloring... She taught me to make all my lines go in one direction when I color. She also taught me how to outline the shape I'm coloring...I'd say those are two valuable life lessons.
Eliana loves the letter E and writing her name... so I hold her hand in mine and we say E-L-I-A-N-A as we write the letters. Then she takes the crayon by herself, scribbles away joyfully making sounds that sound like a mixture of letters and numbers.

Our trip to the village

On Friday we went out to visit the family we stayed with in 2008. It's hard to believe that was already two years ago! As we were walking through the other houses toward our old home, we saw Roni who used to be a small twelve year old. He is now a huge fourteen year old! Unbelievable how they change!

Of course, because hospitality is SO important, Bhabi made us a wonderful meal. This is her kitchen. You'd be amazed at what can be produced in such a simple kitchen.
Ellie had a blast! It took her a while to warm up, but once she got comfortable, we had to work hard to keep track of her. Here she is with some fruit. Our family has papaya and mango trees. You can see the papayas are nice and ripe. Ellie is pretending to put a mango in her mouth... The mango is about the size of a pea right now because it isn't ripe, but their tree will probably produce mangos just a bit smaller than the papaya she's touching. So delicious!!!
I know that holding this little chick was the highlight of Ellie's day because right before she fell asleep that night, she pointed to her hand and said baby cluck cluck... which of course means baby chicken. Then yesterday at supper, she was pointing to her hand again and saying baby cluck cluck but she added the word "gentle"... it took me a minute to understand what she was saying, but she started stroking her hair, which is how I taught her the word "gentle".
In spite of efforts to help Ellie be gentle, the chick needed a little TLC when it was done with Ellie. I was amazed at how much the chick perked up after a sip or two of water...
And what kind of trip to a village would be complete without climbing a tree... even if you aren't quite 1 1/2 years old yet, right? Like father, like daughter.
And of course there's always time to give your daddy a little love.
Something else we realized while we were out in the village was how much Bangla Ellie is learning. We speak mainly English with her at home, and she seems to understand most stuff and she is always saying new things. After a tiny bit of time in the village, we overheard her responding to everyone speaking Bangla to her in Bangla! She even answered the question, "Tumi kemon acho?" (How are you?) with "Bhalo." (Good.) I was shocked!!!! Kids are so amazing.

If our camera hadn't broken...

If our camera hadn't broken after that fun cookie making session last week (I won't tell you who dropped the camera) our beloved camera broke. I didn't actually feel a strong attachment to our camera until I got to thinking about how that was the camera that took all the pictures when Ellie was born and travelled with us when we got to visit the Solomons and Australia last year. Don't worry, our friend is bringing a new camera from the States later this week, so hopefully, you will see new pictures soon!
If our camera hadn't broken, I am sure that I would have taken the time to post pictures of our fun trip to the river, well where the river usually is. As it's dry season, it has receded so far that you can walk out about 1/4 mile and the kids could play on sand dunes. I would have also posted a picture of Ellie climbing on things, and of Ellie eating raw onions. She really likes them. Maybe I would have also taken the time to post pictures of the delicious chicken taco meal I made, or of the unbelievably delicious homemade pizza my husband made. But alas, our camera did break, so all of those pictures will have to exist in my head, and not on this blog.
Hopefully I can share some of the memories we make next week!

What does your sick one year old like to do?

Ellie has been sick the last few days. She needs lots of attention which makes it a little bit harder for me to get my own stuff done. She still enjoys activities that I do with her, though, so this afternoon I put her to work making cookies. Her favorite thing was to roll out the dough. She was also pretty good at pushing down the cookie cutters.


Unfortunately, she was too good at tasting her own work before it was cooked!


All the cookies turned out fine, the fish, the dolphins, and the butterflies. We took a plate of them to our neighbors upstairs and downstairs. My favorite cookies are pictured below... it doesn't matter that they are a bit burnt and two of them broke.


And what cookie making/eating session, not to mention blog post, would be complete without a good floss, huh? Ellie likes to do what her parents are doing, and when I took this picture, her daddy was... can you guess?... flossing.

Moving.

Obviously, there are a million things involved in moving. I want to let you know that I tried to capture all of them with the camera. Lucky for you, I am only going to post a few photos. Unfortunately, in the future, I am sure I will force some poor soul to look at ALL the pictures with me...
In the meantime, I'll share a bit of our process with you. After a few days of putting things in suitcases, we set everything out on the lawn in front of the guest house where we'd been staying. We bought some of the furniture from there since it's closing down, and we owned no furniture. The picture below is at the beginning of putting everything out. I was too busy toward the end of the process to take a picture.

Once our stuff was out, two van garis arrived to transport our stuff to our new place. It's only about 1/2 mile down the road, so it wasn't too long of a trip. Check out how loaded up they get those things!


Ellie and I waited at the new place for our stuff to start arriving. Ellie was looking out of our new front veranda to see the big arrival.


Once our stuff was mostly moved, it was time to do a bit of work. Here's our live in carpenter. Don't you love how he stores a pencil in his hair!?


Aaaah! The work is all worth it. Franklin and I woke up the first morning in our new place and enjoyed a hot drink together before Ellie woke up. In case you are wondering, Franklin is drinking black coffee with sugar and I am drinking hot chocolate. And we are both using the mugs that I got Franklin for our 4th anniversary.

Back to blogging.

I have wanted to blog so many times over the last month or so... I have taken millions of pictures... well not millions, but it might actually be almost 1000. We celebrated Christmas, moved into a new apartment, travelled, had my dad visit... all with my favorite little person to take photos of.
I am finding it a bit overwhelming to start blogging again, though. Where do I start? I've decided to start today with a very disturbing discovery I made this morning!


The disturbing discovery is not how big my nose looks in the picture, although I was startled by that. It's not even how badly my eyebrows obviously need some attention... Someone needs to pluck those monsters or something! No, it's those little white hairs on the eyebrow on the left side of the picture. WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?

I have been thinking about it for a few hours now, and I have three possibilities.
A. I am getting old. Franklin has spotted gray hairs on my head. Maybe my right eyebrow is just advancing quicker than the rest of my hairs.
B. I have a new vitiligo spot on my eyebrow. I actually do have vitiligo, which means I am losing my skin pigment. It's what Michael Jackson had. Anyway, if I have a spot on my eyebrow, the hairs there would lose pigment, too.
C. After I put medicine on Ellie's eczema, I played with the hairs on my eyebrow, and the medicine bleached a few hairs.

I am hoping it is situation C. I don't like the idea of growing old or my vitiligo spreading to my face.

Oh well, whatever it is, at least I'm back to blogging.