Secondborn

Remember what I said about the second child proving to you that what worked with the first won't work the second time around? Well this little two and a half year old is the reason for that statement. Our mornings go a little something like this:
6:15 a.m. The alarm hasn't even gone off yet. I hear a soft thump and little pitter patter of feet, then the door opening, then more pitter patter, closer now, and then:
"MOMMYYYYYYYYY!" in the loudest, hissing whisper he can fathom. "ARE YOU AWAKE?!!!"
"Mm-hmmm...."
"CAN I GET DRESSSSSSSSED?!?"
"...mmm...yeah, hun....*trying to think of something that will occupy him, safely, so I can buy a couple of more minutes*....hey bud, why don't you go find your Buzz toy?"
"BECAUSE I WANT TO GET DRESSSSSSSSED!" (every sentence starts with "because" or "probably" with him, can't tell you why...)
"Okay.....do you want to go play in the basement?" (last ditch effort, basement works every time).
"BECAUSE I WANT TO GET DRESSSSSSSSSED!"
"Okay okay....can you give Mommy just a couple of minutes?" (couldn't hurt to ask....)
"OKAY!!!!" he complies, then more pitter patter. Did that really just work? "I GO WAKE UP CHLOE!!!!!!"
"WHOA, hold up! I'm up, I'm up, let's go get dressed, bud!"
"Because I want to get my diaper changed!" he protests, at the door with his hand on the knob. I feel something like a policeman trying to talk a man out of pulling the trigger on his gun.
"Okay, okay, well just let Mommy do it, okay? Just take your hand off the door, don't go in there or you'll wake up-" too late. He barrells back into the room and starts yanking at the stiff dresser drawers, making an aweful creaking noise and banging them shut as I start to approach.
"I wanna wear green shirt!" he demands. Green shirt. His best friend in the whole world. Actually, this is green shirt #2, the first one got put away, so he latches on to another one. He even points it out in pictures like it's one of the family ("Mommy, Daddy, Chloe, Linus, Odell, aaaaannnnnd GREEN SHIRT!!!!"). Unfortuantely green shirt can only be worn once a week, so the other six days I have to come up with another way to convince him to wear something else. As queitly as I can, I pull out shirt after shirt desperately trying to convince him that the red shirt with the hood is super soft, here, feel it, or the grey striped one has buttons, look, or this one has a basketball on it, isn't that cool? Finally, something clicks and he eventually chooses another one. He barrells back out of the room, Chloe thankfully slept through it all, and I collect the rest of his clothing and head downstairs. We get his diaper changed after about ten minutes of negotiating. "I want to take off my pants! Where's my shoes? Where's my socks? No, I want to lie down MYSELF! I want to take off my diaper! I want to wipe! I want to put it back on!" and then, the kicker. "PROBABLY I DON'T WANT TO WEAR THESE PANTS!!!! NOT THESE ONES!!!" And I've had about enough. It's these pants or nothing, bud. But, ah, I don't actually say that outloud because I know exactly what he'll chose and it won't be the pants. So I collect him and the rest of the clothes up, carry him screaming into the basement where he can't be heard and we put the pants on, after which he immediately calms down and says "Oh. I like these pants!"
Breakfast is another ordeal, you can imagine, and the entire morning mostly revolves around him. It's not all bad, though, and in fact he is improving little by little. I've definitely found that the more calm I am about things, even if it takes longer to convince him to do what I ask, he eventually does it, but if I lose it, he loses it and kicks his heels in deep.
He and Chloe certainly have vivid imaginations and will come up with the most hairbrained games and situations that they act out. I love it. Mostly it involves them running around the house, averting and sometimes getting caught by "the bad guys" or "the monsters". Linus's favorite monster is one by the name of "Neenano". I have no idea where he heard that or where it comes from, but I often hear him in the other room, running around with Chloe until he exclaims at the top of his lungs "OH NOOOOO, CHLOE! IT'S .......... A ........... NNNNEEEENANO!!!!" He LOVES to eat. Every morning is constantly interrupted by a question about when snack time is or when lunch time is or can he have an orange or can he have some raisins. That is, until it's dinner time and then whatever we're having is "GROSS" until we manually shove it in his mouth and then it's the best thing he's ever had (remember the pants? See a pattern immerging here?).
What I love about Linus:

• When he cries, he's always up for a cuddle. That's usually how I calm him down is just kneeling down and opening up his arms and it doesn't matter what he was fussing about, he comes right over and colapses in my arms with racking sobs.
  
• He's very helpful sometimes. Sometimes when I don't need him to be, like when he discovers my dresser and unloads everything off of the top of it to bring to me. A lot of times I'll be making bread and I turn around and find little presents he's left on the counter for me, like my cell phone, my glasses, a necklace or two, some spare change, etc.
  
• Getting a BIG wet slobbery kiss before bed every night from him.
• When he says his prayers at night (that is, when he's not being silly about it and we have to start him over twenty times because he just wants to be a goof-off) and he quietly prays for everyone in the family and prays to be a good boy and listen to Mommy and Daddy. Sometimes that makes it all worth it.
  
• He loves to make me laugh, always a clown. One night I was getting them ready for bed and after he pulled his pants up, he pulled them halfway up his chest, then slumped down like an old man and began hobbling around the room with a silly grin on his face. I lost it and just started busting up laughing. What two year old walks around like an old man? I can see I'm going to have a tough time with him when he's a teenager...
• He's super smart. He talks a mile a minute, repeats anything you say (not always a good thing), and is learning things just about at pace with Chloe, who is two years older than him. Well...not quite at pace, she's starting to make some leaps and bounds herself, but as far as kinesthetic things, like fine/major motor skills stuff, he really excels (big surprise, right?). I'm told that juggerknaut speed he takes crashing into things every minute of every day will pay off on the football field one day. :-)
• He. Is. A. Boy. Love little boys, and they will grow up to be good men.
  

Firstborn

A girl at church told me a while ago after the primary program, after lavishing on how cute Chloe is, that she looks like a little secretary with those glasses on.
But come on...she is pretty cute in them isn't she? :-) Wherever we go when it's the two of us, people stop and giggle at her and then look at me and exclaim about how she looks just like a mini-version of me. And she does!
It's really fascinating to watch her grow and develop. I think every set of parents has a unique relationship with the oldest child in the family because they get to go through everything first (...then the second one comes along and proves to you that just because it worked with the first child doesn't mean it will work with the second...). Sometimes she will do or learn something and I think "Oh my gosh, I have a genius child, no other kid her age can do that!" and then other times she will get together with a group of friends and I come home and think "She will never be ready for the world, all of those kids could do X and Chloe's not even close to learning how to do that!". But most of the time? Most of the time we are just friends, and I don't care if she can write her alphabet forwards and backwards or recite the Declaration of Independence verbatim, I'm just glad to be around her and she's glad to be around me. I hear that the ages of 4-10 or 11 (preteen) are the golden years of childhood because they are not teenagers yet, they can do most things like going potty and getting a drink of water, etc. by themselves, and they still like to be around their parents. Chloe's graduated into these golden years with flying colors and she is such a help around the house most of the time.
Socially she is doing very well. She's in a playgroup with a few other moms and their four year olds as far as I know she does a good job with the other kids and enjoys it greatly (at least she does when we have it at our house!). She LOVES to play Mommy/Teacher. She will pick Linus up in her imaginary car (or airplane sometimes too) and take him to school or church for me. She will sit him down and try to be his teacher, but it doesn't always work out so well because she must think that every teacher talks in a foreign language- whenever she starts talking to him as "teacher" she will make up words and speak in tongues and Linus will give her a guffaw-like stare for a few minutes before he gets bored and leaves (which for a teacher, naturally, is very rude, and so it will usually end up with one of them wrestling the other to the ground- she will have to learn about corperal punishment before she gets her liscense obviously...). She often comes up to me while I'm feeding Odell and say in a very lady-like voice "Oh, HI Anna! Is this your baby?!" *she will often call me Anna or another name she can think of and gets quite affronted when I don't play along, to the point where I'm not even allowed to call Odell by her name, I have to think of a different one for her because obviously Anna AND Mommy can't both have a baby named Odell...*. "She is SO cute," she continues, then dotes on her and wants to hold her and love her or will gently wipe her mouth with the burp rag or get her a toy. She has also started with the "Why?" game.
"Mommy, why do we come home all the time? Mommy, why do we drive in the car? Why do we go to bed? Why do we go potty? Why do you have a baby? (have successfully avoided that one when manageable) Why do I get up in the morning? Why do I eat food? " Then she'll ask questions that have absolutely nothing to do with anything. I think she does it just to make sure I'm paying attention. "Mommy...why does he sing the song ALL day?" *me looking around wondering who "he" is, what he is singing, and why he sings ALL day...and "I don't know, honey," is NOT a sufficient answer, so by the end I have to make up something like "Well, "he" is in a hot air balloon and up there you have to sing to be heard, so he just has to sing all day long!" until she is satisfied.*
Some of my favorite things that she does:

• I love it when she sings. She LOVES to sing. Me being called as primary chorister made me about one of the coolest people on the planet. For family night sometimes we will let the kids share their talents and Chloe usually always sings. Just like her made-up teacher language, she stands up on something and belts out nonesense words at the top of her lungs, then occasionally will add something that might sort of sound like a primary song in there, so it will end up sounding something like this: "Faaaah cha ko-chi ka ka saabaaah faaaah Iknowmyheavenlyfatherlovesmeeeeeeeeeeee seeee ka chokey faaah saaaa lllllaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!"...then a pause and a bow to let us know she's done, to which we are to promptly reply with vigorous cheering and clapping.
  
• Sometimes she wants to show me a "ballerina dance", so she'll sit me down somewhere, then she starts to dance, except she's clearly somewhat embarassed because she doesn't really know what she's doing, so halfway through twirling and stretching her legs around, she watches me smirk a little and then she breaks into giggles and grabs her cheeks to stop herself from smiling so she can finish her dance. Obviously if her hands are covering her cheeks, I can't see the smile and it still counts as a serious ballerina dance.
  
• I showed her how to play five notes in a row with each finger for each of her hands on the piano and she is THRILLED that she can do it by herself. She still can't find middle C, so it's always something somewhat obscure sounding, but she's excited to do it and she practices on it almost everyday. Gotta start teaching that girl piano!
  
• Speaking of obscure sounding, she also has a small child-sized cheapo guitar that my mom gave to her for Christmas a couple of years ago. The thing can not be tuned, despite my desperate attempts to do so, the pegs are just cheap and won't stick, so the strings are mostly loose and the ones that are tight are not near the right notes. I don't remember when this became a tradition, but somewhere along the line while Linus is taking a bath on any given night, Chloe gets to play the guitar, and vice versa when Chloe gets in the tub. I think I must have done it when we stopped giving the kids a bath together (they fight too much over the toys and we end getting more soaked than they are by the end) so that the other had something occupying to do...so Chloe will sit on a stool in the bathroom while I'm giving Linus a bath, serenading me with this very mid-eastern sounding out of tune instrument, belting out her nonsense/primary songs. It's about as cultural of an experience this mother of three little ones can get each week. Maybe next week I'll dress up and make some hors doeuvres to munch on and bring a cool nightlight to plug in or something exotic like that...
• I love it when she tries to teach Linus how to talk. The fact of the matter is, Linus is an exceptional talker for his age (not always a good thing), but it doesn't matter what the word is or how correctly he's saying it, it's not correct enough. "Linus say 'pet."
  "Pet."
  "No no no, say 'PEH'...."
  ""peh...."
  "TUH!"
  "TUH!"
  "PET"
  "PETUH!"
  "Good job! Mommy, Linus can say 'PET!"
  "YEEEAHHH! Mom, I can say 'PET'!!!"

Chloe is also learning how to draw. It's funny how one day they just scribble, and then the next day they can draw you with such stunning acuracy that your heart just goes a-flutter. For example:I mean, really! She's captured my mustache-like eyelashes perfectly.
Love that girl. :-)

A new calling

So a couple of weeks ago I was assigned at church to be the primary chorister (I teach kids how to sing! Finally, my dream calling has come true...). So have I had fun practicing all the songs and learning all the words and using my skills to fulfill a purpose at church? Yes. But what I've also rediscovered is my dormant artistic skills.
A little known fact about Mrs. Ellingson is that she loves to draw. Not to toot my own horn, but I'm not particularly bad at it when I put my mind to it either. I haven't done anything too detailed lately, but this new job has kept me particularly busy. Music time in primary always has fun little games where kids come up and choose a picture (leaves on a tree, petals on a flower, etc...)on the board and read what's on the back to dictate what they will sing. Or have the creatively made pictures to help kids remember what the words are. I don't know who started that tradition back in the eons of time when singing time in primary evolved, but I don't think music time would be music time at church without those games. Anyway, this has been a perfect opportunity to start my music game/words collection. Not only that, but I've been meaning to make some things like this for family night lessons for the kids, but have never gotten around to it. Now I have a reason to do it!
Anyway, so far I've made two games: one is to help review songs (for different songs I'll have to make different dice). The second is another one I'm starting for wiggle songs for the little kids- they are zoo animals- the zoo animals have "been in their cages too long" and kids can come pick an animal that has a particular wiggle song on the back. I'll test it out this Sunday if I can make enough animals.
PS- I have fallen in love with Sarah Jane. When I was in high school, I had two choices for my creative outlets, basically. One was choir/music, the other was art. To begin with, I took an art class and choir classes. Then I had a really bad art teacher, and also figured out that art meant work, and let's be honest. I was a teenager. Choir wasn't as much work. Someday I will go back and take some painting/watercolor classes I think, because I never made it that far in art before I dropped the class. Sarah Jane makes me want to drop everything I'm doing and start drawing for kids' books. Like majorly. I can't look through her stuff too long without feeling like I'm wasting my life not creating something as DARLLINGLY cute as her stuff is.



I borrowed the elephant from Sarah Jane. It's not exactly the same, but it was too cute not to try to imitate!

Mormon Blogging

I've been thinking a lot about blogging lately. I recently read an article a friend of mine posted on facebook (that I later reposted on my own page) about this self-proclaimed feminist atheist woman who was addicted to reading mormon womens' blogs. She loved their sense of thrift, creativity, motherhood, simpleness, etc, but couldn't accurately figure out why because of her own beliefs, which she thought were opposite to theirs. It was a pretty good article if anyone is interested in reading it here.
So, then I started looking at the bloggers of the women she was reading constantly, and then reading the blogs that they followed, and the blogs that they followed and so on. A lot of things sort of rubbed me the wrong way and I had a hard time pinpointing what it was. Some, not all, of the mormon women seemed to, in my opinion, almost pride themselves in the fact that yes, they were mormon, but not a so called "main-stream" mormons. It was their beliefs in things that were different than what every other mormon believed that made them unique, stand out, more intelligent, more independent. One particular woman was in the process of applying to graduate school at BYU and was now questioning whether or not she should delete some of her previous entries for fear that if an administrator read her blog, some of her opinions could disqualify her from acceptance. Her friends than encouraged her to stand by what she wrote and don't be afraid of what anyone else thinks.
I think back on when I was in high school and the word "fake" became very prevelant. "He's so fake, I would never date him." "I can't believe she said that, she's so fake," implying that there are people out there who exist, with morals, standards, likes and dislikes, but who ignore them for the sake of popularity. It was an extension of the insecurity that ALL teenagers have about popularity. No one knows if they are popular or not, not even the popular ones. However, if I can identify others who are doing things just because they want to be popular, than I can separate myself from that and prove that I don't really care about popularity. I certainly wouldn't have said this at the time, but years later while interacting with some teenagers, I heard that same word crop up, fake. And I immediately thought, "Oh, they are just children still, and can't see that putting themselves above others in that way only brings pain."
But don't we still do that a lot? Especially as women, and especially, unfortunately, sometimes as mormon women. I think when it comes to what the world thinks, sometimes we are insecure about looking like the zombie barbie-looking housewife who's greatest concern in life is what kind of Jell-O her husband wants with dinner that night and who loves and thanks every member of the ward at testimony meeting each month and who has no intelligence, integrity, or reality in herself at all. Even to each other we tend to do it. So we dip a little bit into what the world thinks about issues and butter it on our bread a little bit to show everyone that hey, I'm mormon, but I'm real too.
Personally, I realized this is sort of like having a home in Zion and a summer house in Babylon, and it doesn't really work. It caused me to reflect back on the things I do, even in relief society or at church, and try to put myself out there as "different", when I should be putting myself out there as someone who can help and lift and serve and who doesn't care if you eat Jell-O or if you breastfeed your children until they are twenty or if you proclaim yourself and tell everyone that you crochet AND do photography AND blog AND teach music (....ahem....)...
Anyway, point of all this being, I just feel like God made people different. But in faith, we should all be one. We celebrate our differences, not criticize them, but we proclaim the same faith and the same standards and the same God, because we love God, and the only reason we should do anything in life is because we love Him. If we carry His name upon us, and proclaim ourselves as members of his church, than we should represent him in all that we do, be we zombie-house wives or crocheting, blogging, singing, photographers. :-)
And....going on day TWO of sever-weather school cancellation. There's probably a good reason I'm not at home all the time...

What I love about thrift stores...

Two trips to find other things, stumbled on 25 books, including several additions to our Bearenstein Bears, Curious George, Madeline, and some of these luscious titles:




This book received an audible gasp from me when I found it: I had this book when I was a kid and a flood of memories came back when I saw the title- the chocolate ice cream, the tooth necklace, the tooth fairy, everything. Very exciting.

I love Jan Brett- I also got the Gingerbread Baby by her as well while on one of these trips, The Lost Mitten was probably one of my favorite books when I was a kid, but when I came home and opened up the Owl and the Pussycat, I was thrilled to find this:


I just looked on ebay and comparable titles by Jan Brett that were signed were going for $50 a piece. I paid a buck for it.
So, just for fun, I looked up all the titles I bought at the ARC online and got their shelf-price for all of them and came up with a total of about $100 ($150 if you count the signed copy). I then added up what I paid for everything (most of the titles I got were 50% off because I went on a Saturday and today, which was Martin Luther King Day)- $23 all together.
I originally went to get some new clothes for Linus because I've run out of stock from donations I received from moms of older boys at church (I would love to add up what I would have paid for all the clothes I got, but I'll save that for another day...), but every time I go to a thrift store I always have to stop in the childrens book section (Savers in Ft. Collins, which is now sadly closed, used to have a huge wall full of them and they were each 69 cents a piece, ARC isn't quite as good, but better than full price for sure). Our little kids library is full of thrift books, I love it. Craig scoffed at me when he saw me pull the books out of the bag and said "Don't we have enough books?" to which I promptly replied "NO! Not even close." When I was a kid we had a huge shelf full of kids books and each night I could go and pick one out to read before bed, I loved it! I wish I knew what happened to those books, but between all the moves we went through growing up they all disappeared, but I'm well on my way to creating our own collection.
Thank you ARC. You've made my life an affordable place to live.

In need of assistance!

I need help! In an effort to promote both my photography as well as my crocheting, I am in need of some children models for my hats of varying gender, age, and size! So here is the deal: if you are interested in loaning me your child to model, please submit in an email your child’s name, age, gender, and head size (in cm please) including a recent picture to chelseas_attic@yahoo.com. Of the applicants I receive, I will chose 5-10 children to photograph on a specific day in Spring/Summer. What you get in return: you can either have a CD including all the professional shots of your child for that day or you can keep the hat. Either way, you’ll be helping me out and it’d be a great chance to get something free from yours truly. J You do not have to live in the area to apply, but you would need to be available for photos in Colorado this Spring or Summer. I need children of all ages, even newborns, so if ya got one or you will have one soon, send me a note! Applications are due by the end of February. Thanks for your help and hope to hear from you soon!!

Christmas and so on...

So this hopefully won't be too long of a post, but I feel like I have a lot to cover! First and foremost: Christmas! It was fun. Short week and a half, but fun. I don't think I did diddly squat the whole time. The only thing Craig and I really had on our agenda was to have fun on Christmas, take the kids to the pool at the Fun Plex sometime, and see Tron, and we conquered all three. I would have loved to take my camera to the Fun Plex, they have a pretty awesome splashy-watery-playground there, but there was no way I was going to risk damaging my camera for that, so I left it at home. Note to self: next Christmas I want a cheapo waterproof camera. The kids had a blast on Christmas, had a blast at the pool, and were sleeping when we went to see Tron. :-) Although I did go and see Tangled with Chloe and my two sisters-in-law: loved it. It was totally not what I was expecting and I laughed outloud through a lot of it. :-)
Anyway, here are a few shots. I had a lot more, but I don't want to waste my entire night waiting for pictures to load on blogger, so I'll just get the important ones.

I love Odell's eyes in this shot. She gives this look a lot nowadays when a toy is presented in front of her because she's finally figuring out how to get it in her hands and then in turn, in her mouth.
Remember when I said we splurged and got the kids something big this Christmas? Well here they are unwrapping it. I only had my 50 mm lens on, so I couldn't get a lot of it in the shot, but it took up like the whole living room when Santa left it by the tree...

What is it??Pow-pow-POWER WHEELS! When I was a kid, only the rich kids had power wheels. Well, we're not rich, but we just couldn't resist. :-) They love it! Unfortunately it's snowed a bunch the last couple of weeks and so we haven't been able to take it out much, but here you can see Chloe enjoying it. Linus just crashes it into everything, but he sure has fun doing it.

Yes, that is my husband barbequeing in the snow. Why wait until summer to enjoy all the good food? That was the Ellingson philosophy on this particular snowy night. Not rain nor snow nor storm will keep us from our ribs...Well, it's getting late, so I'll just post one more update: Odell's four month checkup (at five months). She weighs 13 lbs. 2 oz....oh poop, and I forgot how long she is and how big her head is. The sheet is in the car and I'm too lazy and cold to go out in the garage and get it. I do remember, however, that her percentages have gone way down since her last visit (except for her head size, that's still at a whopping 99%). I definitely noticed that she's not as big as my other two were at the same age, but she doesn't look gaunt or anything. She was at 66% for weight and 80% for height and dropped down to 18% for weight and 23% for height. Her doctor things she's just gearing up for a growth spurt, but we'll check again in another 6 weeks just to make sure. In the meantime, her large noggin is preventing her from having a very enjoyable tummy time because she's got a lot of head to hold up, which means we just need to do it more so she can build her neck muscles. I'm not too worried about anything, she eats well, has lots of rolls on her legs and arms, and is a happy baby.
As you can see here.