A sick computer

Our computer yesterday all of a sudden would not let me boot up. Bad news bear, I know. A blue screen that seemed to have a pageful of pertinent information on why it wasn't booting up would flash across the screen for about point two seconds and then disappear, giving me time to catch about two words before it was gone, and then a black screen would appear saying that the bootup failed and what mode would I like to try to restart it in? I chose every single one and it never started up, just kept going through the same blue screen/black screen cycle. Craig's dad brought it to work with him today to see if a friend of his could look at it for us, but I was almost in tears last night thinking about all the pictures, starting from when we bought our camera the Christmas we got married, through two newborns and life leading up until now, all the home videos from about two years, and all the music I've purchased on that computer that I HAVEN'T BACKED UP that could potentially be lost. I didn't even print pictures to start Linus's scrapbook! I have very few pictures on our desktop, and some videos on our camera we haven't downloaded yet, and aside from the ones in Chloe's birthday slideshows/ first year scrapbook, those are the only outside copies we have. Luckily I updated my iPod the night before this happened, so all my music is there, but if I lose those pictures I will be quite sad.
Just thought I would let everyone know. Wish I wasn't so dang dependent on a stupid computer...

These Boots Were Made for Walking...

...And that's just what they won't do. I received these ADORABLE pink cowboy boots from a friend who's daughter had grown out of them, and Chloe hates them. Everytime I try to put them on her, she just says "No boot! No boot!" and won't walk unless I help her. We're trying them again today and I think she'll get used to them if I just let her walk around the house in them...wish us luck.

Yowzers!

Right after I dropped Chloe and Linus off at Grandma's house this morning, I was talking to Grandma for just a second when out of the corner of my eye I see Chloe slip on the stairs she was playing on and smack her face into the steps. She came up screaming and holding her mouth (which she often does, even if she doesn't hurt her mouth), but when we brought her into the kitchen, she was bleeding quite a bit out of her mouth. We located the owie: she had bit pretty hard right into the tip of her tongue. We had a hard time getting her to not curl her tongue in so Grandma could put a little pressure on it with a paper towel to get it to stop bleeding, but finally the bleeding ceased a little and she permitted us to view her tongue as she sheepishly stuck it out of her mouth through sobs and big fat tears. This picture was taken this evening about 7 or 8 hours later, but it still looks yucky.
The picture doesn't do it exact justice, but there's a good chunk of tongue flapping in the wind. From what I was told by a nurse, however, anything in the mouth heals quickly, and she was happy and able to eat pretty much just fine the rest of the day, so we didn't take her in to the doctor or anything.
This has been an interesting week for both our kids. Linus has had very icky poopy diapers for about the last month or so, maybe not quite that long, but close to it. As a result he's had a nasty diaper rash to accompany it. He was soiling about 7-10 extremely foul diapers a day, and Craig and I didn't think that was quite normal. So with the idea that it might possibly be something he was eating, like perhaps some type of allergy, I took him to the doctor just to be sure. She didn't run any tests or anything, gave me a couple of tips for the diaper rash, and instructed us to go ahead and take out wheat and dairy from his diet. Celiacs disease is a risk because it is in the family (which concerns gluten), which is the reason for both the wheat and the dairy. It's been one day so far and I actually changed two diapers today that were only wet, which I haven't done in a long time. However, I'm not betting on anything. It could be a number of different reasons and factors for bad diapers or good ones, so we'll do this for a couple of weeks and see what happens, and if it clears up, I'll introduce one or the other back into his diet and see what happens. I'm not too concerned about it being Celiacs disease- it seems like a major symptom of that at his age would be problems eating and problems putting on weight, and since he's not quite 8 months and 23 lbs, I'm fairly sure that's not an issue. But we'll see how it goes.
Other than that, life is busy, and good! Craig started back in school this week and I've taken on a number of guitar students and even a violin student (go figure, I went to school as a vocalist!). Still looking for people to take pictures of...and dreaming of becoming the next Ansel Adams in the meantime (yeah right!).
Love to all

See-tah!

Merry Christmas a couple of weeks late! If you haven't noticed, Halloween updates were a couple of weeks after Halloween, Chloe's birthday was a couple of weeks after her birthday, and so it's natural that Christmas would follow suit. We had a great day and the kids really enjoyed it. Here we have the lineup of all of the Ellingson children located at Ellingson command central Christmas morning: from left to right, Amber, Daniel, Kyle, Seth, Ethan, Kaleb, Chloe, and Linus, who can't stand yet. :-)


Here is Linus enjoying the tag to his toy more than his toy.
Chloe remembered well how to open presents from her birthday a month previous. I think she thought that it was her birthday again, because she kept singing "Happy Day!" and got quite upset when she realized that she couldn't open everyone's presents.

Papa Brown came to visit for the afternoon and we had fun playing ping pong, eating good food, and opening even more gifts!Here is Chloe and Linus enjoying their new table. Linus sits in it very well and he loves to pound his hands on the table. Chloe loves to eat her fruit snacks on it now.
All in all it was a relaxing day, and a very relaxing break. I think we played games pretty much the whole time. Aunt Beth and Uncle Ben came to visit the day after Christmas for a week from California, so it was nice to see them. I even got to take some pictures for an old high school friend, which was so much fun. And now we are all back to the grind...if you can call singing "Kumbaya" with kindergartners and playing "Lou, Lou, Skip to my Lou" "the grind". :-) Next stop, Spring Break! .... Oi!