All things Elna.

I really, really want to get her in a tumbling class.  She does splits and summersaults all day long.

This smile lights up our life!

And her laugh too!

I love this little dress on Elna—it’s from Grandma Fae and Papa.

Love how she’s trying to pose.

Brian’s uncle, David, took this picture of Elna through the window in the nursery door.

Elna helping Brian peel and chop apples for an apple crisp.

We aren’t usually up when Brian leaves in the morning for work, but on this morning we were and Elna loved helping Brian make his lunch.

While I feed Harriet every night, Brian reads to Elna.  Right now they are reading the Illustrated Stories of the Book of Mormon.  I love that they have this special time together.  They are such a team!

Elna has a chore chart and loves being able to put stars on it.  One of her chores is helping with the laundry.  She finds all of the socks and panties, and folds all of the towels.  I took this picture because I had gone back to put Hattie down for a nap and was gone for maybe 3 minutes.  When I came back she had folded this entire stack of dish towels.  I didn’t even know she could really fold a towel before this moment.  If you want to see her fold a towel pretty perfectly you are welcome to watch this video:

Elna got into Grandma’s lip stuff when we over at their house one Sunday afternoon.  She was pretty pleased with herself!  She might look pretty solemn in the first picture, but really she is just trying hard to keep her lips together because of the lip gloss on them.

Making Valentines for her Grandma’s and Grandpa’s.

I took these pictures through the window of Elna going up to the door to get her babysitter.  She was so excited to go up by herself and ring the doorbell—such a big girl and so sweet!

Her babysitter painted her nails.  She loves her!

Until this month, Elna took a 2-hour nap every day.  This month she has taken maybe three naps total.  Luckily she usually stays very quiet in her room and has some down time, which is good for her and me.  This time she had laid her blankets out on the floor and was pretending to take a nap when I came in to get her.  Sometimes when I come in her mattress (which is a big and heavy twin size mattress) is off the base, and she is using it as a slide.  Usually most of her clothes are all over the room and she is always in a new outfit.  This girl makes me laugh!

This was also making me laugh.  We were having a staring contest.

Hot chocolate!

Elna is a full-fledge sentence talker.  She sings all of the time and is heard all day long making up words to songs, even though she knows the real words.  I want to write down everything she says these days, but I do try to write down some of my favorites when I remember to.  The first few of these are from when she was just stringing several words together, and then they get a little more complex:

Several months ago, Brian was helping Elna clean up her toys and told her to put her kitchen hot pad away.  Elna (holding the hot pad under her shirt on her chest) said, “No, I drippin”  (as in she was nursing, but her milk was dripping)

When she first started talking you could tell by the way she talked that she was thinking about every word as she enunciated each words so carefully, like “What—are—you—doing—Dad?” (each word said very clearly with a small space in between)

When asked where something is, like “where is your pacifier?”, she will often respond with: “It’s hidin’” 

Elna after being strapped into her car seat often says: “Who’s ready for this?”

When she was still getting a hang of urinating on the toilet, she would sometimes go on the toilet seat and the floor, and she would say over and over again “It’s all over the place.  It’s all over the place” (but at the beginning it sounded like “It’s all over the pace”)

“I want to tell Hattie about Jesus”

On our way home from Mexico, we were talking about Grandma Elna and she said:  "I miss her all night long"

As I’m leaving her room at night, I say that I love her, and then she says it back, and then I finally say, “last time- I love you” and she says “last time, I love you” back to me, and we have to go back and forth saying that about 5 times.  I don’t think she understands the meaning of “last time”

After she has a good cry and she has tears all over her face, she finds whatever she can to wipe them off, whether it’s our legs, the carpet, the couch, or our shirt.  She makes a big deal of wiping them away.

She has a harder time saying her “f” sounds, so words like “flip flops” “french fries” and “gold fish” sound more like “slip slops” “shench shries” and “gold shish”.  I’m not ready for her to start saying them right.

And finally, a very CUTE video (well worth watching in my opinion) of her “reading” Brown Bear:

I especially love how she says “fishy” (although she used to say gold shish, which was pretty priceless too), “children” and “teacher”.  

We’re just crazy in love with this girl of ours!