Sunday, July 28, 2013

The things that come out of her mouth.

She thinks now that as long as someone says 'okay' after she asks for a thing, she is going to get that thing. A lot of our conversations look like this:

E: Cheese? Okay.

Me: ...

E: Eleanor hold it? Okay.

Me: ...


E [usually with increasing tearfulness]: Mama, up? Okayyyyyy.


She likes to sing while she does her important baby things. Her favorites are Old Macdonald (her rendition consists solely of shouting, 'Sheep sheep heeeeeeere, sheep sheep heeeeeeere') and the ABCs (just a repetition of 'WX' or 'Now I...ABC...Now I...ABC').


She is more like a people all the time.

Friday, July 26, 2013

Food tastes better when it's a little bit grass-stained.

Yesterday and today, we had picnics at the park.


This is different from literally every other day only in that they were evening picnics, and daddy was present.


Park-eating is the only kind of eating we know now.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

We had better nap well.

This morning, we went for a walk by the river.


We stopped at the splash park for a cucumber snack.


We like to run around the splash park before it gets turned on, because we have it to ourselves.


We went to the farmer's market


and had a bison burger with beet compote and sauteed onions.


The splash park is on our way back home, so we stopped in for some group splashing


and a quick drink.


Now we are asleep, having eaten most of our farmer's market apricots. All this, and it's not even noon.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Good thing they're durable.

Eleanor burned her wrist today helping me cook. She likes to sprinkle salt on the whatever, and she got too close to the pan.

The burn is on the same hand as the thumb knuckle she gouged out the other day at the pool.


That is, unfortunately, her sucking thumb, which has made self-soothing challenging. Her knuckles on the other hand are scraped up from the same fall.


Later that day, she went to the park with her daddy and was startled into flight by some puppies she was petting. A startled Eleanor exits with more speed than grace.


I was delighted to hear that that ding was from the sidewalk, not the puppy. A rabies shot is the last thing she needs. She also scraped up her knee in that fall, just a little.


In other news, it has recently come to my attention that not all of you are friends with me on facebook or follow my All-Eleanor youtube channel. Which means that you haven't seen this video of Eleanor telling you what some stuff is:


Or this one, of her declaring her undying love (for burgers):



She walks. She talks! She does not yet make julienne fries, but she will happily salt them for you.

Friday, July 19, 2013

She gets what she wants.

Sometimes Eleanor can be pretty timid, and it can take her a while to warm up to new people or situations. Other times, she is BOLD as BRASS.

We went to the food festival early yesterday because there's always live music and kids running around and stuff, and we were settled in the grass near the stage, when this happened:


Let me zoom in on that for you, since we are SO, SO FAR AWAY.


That little pink hat on the right saw balloons, and she WENT TO THEM, without so much as a by your leave. And then stopped to shake her balloon at some old people on the way back. BALALOON!


Thursday, July 18, 2013

The conversationalist.

Eleanor's starting to remember things that happened and to connect them to other things that also happened, so our conversations have gotten really elaborate.

Me: Remember yesterday at the festival when you had a fried banana?


E: Nana. Eye skeeem!

Me: Yes, it had ice cream on it!

E: Nam nam nam. *casts about for topic with which to continue conversation* Cabbage!


Me: Yes, you also had cabbage yesterday.

E: *very dramatically* PICEY.

Me: It WAS spicy.

E: Nam nam nam.

And so on.

And sometimes something will stick in her head, like this one picture in a book my parents read to her over FaceTime with a puppy hanging upside-down in a tree, and so whenever ANYthing is upside-down, she brings up this puppy. He is the platonic ideal of upside-down.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

All my pictures of Eleanor today are of her eating things.

I've met a girl in Saskatoon who has young children and knows about All The Things, like the double-decker bus where they give a free 'stroller-size' cone to children whose parents buy their own cone, so that said parents can eat said cone in peace without someone clamoring for a biiiiite.


And then today we went to A Taste of Saskatchewan. The things we ate, I can't even.


Eleanor ate them, too.


Monday, July 15, 2013

We are adapting well, I'd say.

We've lived in Saskatoon for two weeks now, and there are things I miss about Calgary. I miss our friends pretty terribly, and I miss our zoo. Especially the hippos.


But I don't miss our house, and I don't miss our location. I don't miss that cupboard you couldn't open if the dishwasher was open, or that drawer you couldn't open if the dishwasher was closed.


I don't miss the mice or the birds. Or the ladybugs. Or the occasional ant.


I don't miss having to use a very precise amount of laundry soap, or face sudsy floods on the laundry room floor. I don't miss the nasty laundry room (or its birds).


I don't miss having to hold my pee while Eleanor napped, or else creep carefully down the stairs over her bedroom to get to the bathroom. I don't miss tiptoeing around the kitchen, since that was over her bedroom, too.


I don't miss the moldy windows, or the ratty carpet, or the bathroom that never looked clean, or the shower whose walls didn't quite meet the tub.


I don't miss the tiny crawl space, or that it was in Eleanor's room, so that I could never do any organizing while she was sleeping (or while she was awake. So...ever, I guess).


Our house here is only three years old, and NOTHING IS WRONG WITH IT. I emptied the last box yesterday, and everything has found a home, so we can finally see how much space we have. It is a lot.


I'm going to go scrub my bathroom now, and when I am done, it will look like a clean bathroom.


Wednesday, July 10, 2013

I'm storing up Vitamin D for the winter.

If it weren't for the lousy winters and the distance from my family, I'd stay in Saskatoon FOREVER.

We go to the park around the corner from us literally every day. It has a pool.



Some days we also go to Kinsmen Park, where the lifeguard has been hooking me up with all her friends who have kids. And her brother's friends who have kids. And her relatives who have kids. And a swim diaper that one time we weren't really planning on swimming so didn't come prepared.


We won't make that mistake again.

This morning, for variety, we went to the OTHER park, the one that's further than our corner park (a 2-min walk) but closer than Kinsmen (a 15-minute walk).


After a good, hard play, we went to our corner park because pool.



And our house has so much SPACE. Eleanor's room is on the main floor, so she can just go there and do stuff while I'm elsewhere doing other stuff.


Also, it's a room, not just a cubicle that her crib and dresser and a box of our winter coats fits into. And then we have this whole other room downstairs that we're eventually going to put a couch in, but which is, for now, just a cool and carpeted play space. We run AMOK down there.


Amok is blurry.

We can also run amok in our backyard, because we have one. You know what else we have? A GARDEN.


It's a little garden. The Eleanor is for scale.

She splashed in a rubbermaid full of water and toys (which I filled with the HOSE and not from the kitchen sink, which is way easier) while I dug in all the plants today, and then she helped me label them.


We harvested our first tomato


and our first strawberry


and when she asked for more of both, I explained about waiting for them to ripen. Now she points at the plants and goes 'Green!' and then shakes her head really firmly and says 'Don't. Eat.' and then points at you and says 'WAIT.' I think she gets it.

Did I mention there's a zoo? And it's no Calgary Zoo, but it IS basically the North America Exhibit of the Calgary Zoo. So there's cougars and bears and long-horned sheep and things, and I fed some geese and Eleanor patted a goat, so it has that going for it.


We dropped by the library yesterday to see what the deal was, and Eleanor went straight to work.


We're headed back there tomorrow for story time, after which we will go to the park (obviously). We are so excited.


Tuesday, July 02, 2013

We have moved!

We are in Saskatoon. We don't get Internet til Friday so all you get are pixelly photos from my phone.

Our new house is beautiful, and there's plenty of room for Eleanor to roam. Or, there will be, once we get all these boxes out of here. BOXES. 


Eleanor is being both amazing and horrible, since this whole experience is both delightful and terrifying to her. NEW SPACES HURRAH! CHANGE, EGADS. 

Thank goodness for my parents, who showed up on Wednesday with a tape gun, four rolls of tape, and two extra sets of hands. They are keeping Eleanor out of mischief, and mostly out of that crazy part if her brain that hates everything. 


Yesterday we called off work early and went to Diefenbaker Park for some Canada Day festivities. Eleanor got a balloon, with which she was (and is currently right now) thrilled, and sat VERY STILL to have her face painted. 


She's a butterfly. 

It was good to be out in the air in the sun, and Eleanor finally had the undivided attention of ALL her people, not just one at a time.

By the end of today, we should be done unpacking. There's a restaurant down the road called the Cheesetoast, where we're going for dinner. Eleanor is happily re-arranging some packing paper. 

GOOD TIMES ARE A-COMIN' IN.