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!

Photos

I forgot to say forever ago...maybe I already mentioned this, I can't remember...but if any are interested, I have a blog with some of my photography on it at chelseasattic.blogspot.com.
More Christmas pics and joy to follow in the near future.

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Here we go!
I am looking to pick up some work that wouldn't require me to be away from home too much, so I am in the beginning phases of setting up something of a photography business. Because I'm just a beginner and can't afford to buy a nice camera quite yet, I am offering photo sessions for cheap. If you're looking to get some nice pictures of your kids or your family before Christmas (or after), I'm offering any session up to two hours including a CD with 30-50 shots on it for $50. I could also make 4X6 of all of the shots for extra, just to cover to cost of printing them (I will pretty much do any printing job you want for cost of printing upon request). I do indoor and outdoor photos, however many people you want at a time. If you are interested in seeing my work, you can look at chelseasattic.blogspot.com until I get any sort of website officially up and running. I do family portraits, kids, babies, engagement, bridal, graduation, and wedding pictures (if you require more than two hours, I would charge $50 an hour after that).
Please contact me on the blog or by email if you are interested (chee_mar@yahoo.com).
Thanks and hope all your holidays are bright and merry. :-)

Newest Addition to the Family

World: Meet "Bee-bee"

We bought Chloe a baby doll for her birthday, and holy cow does she love that thing. It goes with her everywhere. She feeds it, burps it, dances with it, puts it to bed, wakes it up again, changes its diaper, walks it around in its stoller...you get the picture.
Her birthday was fun (now that it's a month later)- she was spoiled with lots of family and lots of presents and lots of cake. Here's a couple of pics from the event...

The cake design was supposed to be for a clown, but I only had certain colors, so I did a princess instead. I think it tuned out cute, if I do say so myself, for an intermediate cake decorator.

Even now a month later, Chloe walks around singing "Happy Day!" (Happy Birthday) and wears her birthday crown all the time.

In the meantime, everything is busy as usual. I finally got my classroom all packed and moved into my "real" classroom. Hopefully I'll remember to take my camera to school so I can blog about it. It's a lot bigger, and they hooked up my internet to the classroom today, so life is good.

Also, for anyone interested, I set up a "photography" blog, for anyone who's interested, where I'll post pictures I've taken of my kids and other people's kids, and so on and so forth. It's at

chelseasattic.blogspot.com. I got the idea from my sister-in-law, and I thought it was really cute and a good idea.

Until next time!

Pumpkins, Pajamas, and Pirates, Oh my!

I realize that it's a week after Halloween, but I had to post these at some point. It makes better sense now than at Christmas. :-)

Chloe went with Grandma Ellingson and Uncle Brian and Aunt Bonnie and the boys to a pumpking patch on the Monday before Halloween to pick out some pumpkins. Bonnie took some pictures for me so I could share in the fun, even though I couldn't make it with them. She sent me this one over email.

It looks like she had fun. :-) Anyway, because we had things going on pretty much everynight that week, we didn't get around to carving pumpkins until Haloween morning. So instead of getting Chloe's clothes all mucked up, I left her in her pajamas and she helped me carve the pumpkins. She was all excited as I stuck the knife in the pumpkin and started cutting out the top. Then I pulled it off and showed her all the insides, thinking that she would love to get her fingers into that. The second she saw all the pumpkin innards, though, she stopped and said "Ewwwwwww!" I urged her to stick her hands in, showing her what to do as I pulled out some seeds and she backed up and put her hands up and said "NO!" Didn't realize I had such a pansy for a daughter! Seriously. Anyway, she was a lot more excited about it after I cleaned it all out. For all who are wondering, incase you can't tell, I carved candy corn. It looked cooler all lit up.

Chloe dressed up as a pirate. She only wore the hat for the pictures, and didn't much want to wear it while we went trick or treating. Without the hat with the skull and cross bones on it, she looked more like a bar-maid than a pirate, but oh well. Craig found a banana costume and then we saw a monkey costume for little babies, so Craig went as a banana and Linus went as a monkey. Except he had to hold Linus when we went trick or treating otherwise people didn't really get it. We just went around our block and then over to Great-Grandpa Ellingson's house and home. Chloe ate too much candy and had a real hard time going to sleep that night because she had a tummy ache. That's sort of our own fault, though, one for letting her eat all that candy and two for never really letting her eat sweets outside of special ocasions so we get to a holiday like Halloween and she gets a little overloaded. I'm sure she would have done it again had she the choice, though. :-)

Linus has his six month checkup next week and I'm a little nervous because he's not sitting up nor is he rolling over. He's almost sitting up and the rolling over thing happens on accident sometimes when he's on his stomach, but he just isn't real motivated to get out and move around quite yet. I think he's developing just fine- he comes up with interesting schemes to get his face next to mine so he can get a good taste of my cheeck or a fistful of my hair- I just don't like the raised eyebrows the nurses give you when they ask you why they're not solving E=MC2 or compising sonatas in C# minor yet. I finally got some pictures of him sucking on his two fingers. It's always the same ones and that's pretty much how he puts himself to sleep. Craig and I are scratching our heads about this: on the one hand, we don't have to worry about losing a pacifier or making sure we have one wherever we go incase he needs it, but on the other hand, you can take away a pacifier when you want him to stop using it at a certain age, and as far as I know chopping off his fingers would be illegal...not to mention painful. Anyway, the scratching of heads stops when you look at how funny he looks choping away at those fingers. Also, he finally started eating solid foods the last couple of days and oh my goodness was he ready for it. He eats and swallows every bite of his rice cereal. We didn't even have to start with some in his bottle or anything at night. By the end of the first food I fed him he was gaping his mouth open for more after every bite- I couldn't get it in fast enough! He just is a food man I guess. He's also dangerously close to fitting into size four diapers already...Chloe is in size four diapers. I'm holding out as long as I can, but holy cow! He's a monster. But a cute one, so I guess we'll keep him. :-P

Opening Night

So Opening Night for the Av's was last week and Craig was so excited to pull out Chloe's old outfit for Linus to wear. We didn't have anything for Chloe, so Craig put on one of his shirts on her and she wore it as a "dress". It was an exciting ten minutes of our day, cause then they went to bed after that. :-) Too bad the Av's lost that night.

I had to add this picture in- if you can see, Chloe slept on her braids one night and woke up with one of them sticking straight up out of her head. She didn't quite know why Craig and I were laughing at her that morning anc kept scowling at us through breakfast as we'd snicker at her hair.

So Linus had his four month check up about three weeks ago and I never posted about it- he's in the 95% for everything. He weighs over twenty pounds already. I have giant callouses on my hands from lugging that stupid carseat with him in it everywhere. I thought Chloe was a chunk, but she didn't weight 20 lbs until she was nine months old. He still drools like a leaky faucet, but he's also testing out his vocal capacity with loud piercing screams whenever he feels like it. I swear I hear all the metal in the house ringing at the same timbre when he's through. Good news is (or bad news, depending on who you are) his horn is slowly fading away. Unfortunately the magical powers associated with it are also diminishing...
...but at least he doesn't have to get it removed, for the next little bit anyway.

Chloe has croup right now. Well the doctor said it was croup, but I always thought croup wasn't contagious and whatever she has, her cousins had it the last couple of weeks too, so we're pretty sure she got it from them. Everyone tried all we could to keep it from her (cleaning toys, being watched during the day at our house instead of theirs, keeping her out of her cousins' play areas, etc...) but how do you keep three very active toddlers from interacting in the same house day in and day out? It was inevitable, pretty much. Friday night when I picked her up to go home after school, she excitedly ran across the lawn to our door and was wheezing audabley and gasping for breath by the time we made it inside. That night she started fevering and didn't sleep much and worried the heck out of her parents with her death rattle breathing. She's doing much better now- still has no voice, but she's breathing fine and running around getting into trouble as usual. But now Linus gets to sleep in our room until she gets better- we are crossing our fingers that he doesn't get it, I'm not sure how well a five month old would take a viral infection like that, even a twenty pound five month old.
And that's our update. Hoorah!