Update: Ellie, age 3.5 years

Since I'm doing updates on her sisters, I've got to do one on our quirky little Gabrielle as well.

She likes cats and dogs and dancing.  She loves wearing her backpack (puts it on upside down).  Ellie has warmed up to the color pink, her middle name, and praying (now fights along with her sisters to say it).  She is still not toilet trained (despite intense, though inconsistent efforts these past three months).  Elle regularly gets out of bed.  Sometimes we have to send her back to her room five or six times before she finally falls asleep.  And then, sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. she just wakes up and wanders into our room, climbs in to our bed, and cuddles up to Drew.  Lately she's been falling asleep in Lainey's bed (top bunk) and she still winds up in our bed mid-way through the night.

Ellie regularly delights/amuses us up with what she says.  When we tell her to do something she says, "Okay, I'm on it."  When she is in trouble she either immediately admits what she did wrong Gilly-like (remember Gilly from SNL?) or dissolves into tears and says, "You said you'd always love me!" (we're pretty sure that came from a recently-read children's book.  She calls her white leggings "ninja pants" and her BYU shirt, a "soccer shirt."

Much like Alaina, Ellie struggles with the S sound when paired with another consonant.  Alaina drops the S sound.  Ellie drops the other consonant so start becomes sart and scared becomes sared.  She still says "bup" for but (and starts a lot of sentences this way which always amuses us).

Elle is highly attached to her daddy.  She calls him her "bestest daddy" and says that she is "his baby" (and "mommy's kid").  When he's around she wants him to do pretty much everything for her (I can't say I mind this too much since she's hounding him not me).  Sometimes when I tell Ellie that I love her she says, "I love you too mommy, but I not as much as I love daddy."  One day she beckoned me closer to hear a "secret" and whispered to me "I love daddy more than you."  Sometimes Drew feels bad that her affection for him leads her to be so innocently inconsiderate of me.  I think it's hilarious.

A couple months ago Ellie's stubbornness met with her overwhelming preference for her father and she fell asleep sitting up in my bed waiting for him to come home and put her to bed (he was on a daddy-daughter date with the oldest two):

We're on our third set of glasses now. We lost the original set in the house.  I feel like I've looked everywhere but they just disappeared a few months ago.  We used our wire rim back up ones until I snapped off one of the nose guards when trying to adjust it a month ago.  Now we have a yellow pair.  I wonder how many we'll go through next year.  Thank goodness for cheap on-line glasses.