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well, now that we are almost starting week 14, we thought it was safe to post that, come this fall…ella will be a BIG SISTER!!!! our due date is october 4th (andrew’s birthday)…but autumn is guessing it will be a september baby…

ella playing big sister with her baby doll

it is hard to believe, that in just a couple more months, we’ll have a 2 year old on our hands. ella is doing wonderfully. she is very interested in being a big girl, wearing anything pink, doing the alphabet, and lately, in plants and the garden.

our big girl is very much in transition. we are working on potty training, so she is going on the potty several times a day and wears training pants part of the time, but also still likes her diapers. we have been successful in cutting down how many time she nurses a day, but she still really loves nursing and asks for ‘mama milk’ at nap time. she is sleeping almost the whole night in her crib, but still checks in once or twice a night. all of these things remind us that she is no longer a baby…but a little girl.

speaking of being a little girl…ella’s new love is P*I*N*K!!!! she has two pink t-shirts (one from grandma sandy, one from grandma kathy) that she LOVES and gets quite upset when we tell her they are in the laundry. we just got her some jelly sandals with pink tulips on them. she loves them so much she wouldn’t take them off for over 24 hours…sleeping in them at night and at nap time.

ella still really like pointing our letters wherever we go. as we pass stores or signs while we are in the car, she will yell out “ABCs!, M, P, A, B!” grandma kathy just got her a cool wooden alligator ABC puzzle. she had a lot of fun telling us all about the ABCs on the puzzle.

we started some bean seeds about a month ago, and they are really growing. ella chants at them daily “grow grow grow!”. yesterday, we both had a lot of fun getting messy with seed starting mix as we planted some lettuce seeds. they are already sprouting and ella is very excited. this morning we did some garden clean up, and ella was yelling ‘GARDEN GARDEN’ all morning (some pictures are posted below). we’re sure that she will have a blast with her own little garden this summer. we are planting miniature veggies: cherry tomatoes, bambino eggplant, baby savoy cabbage, baby romaine, petite pois peas, baby carrots, baby beets, etc. next year, i think we will do all HUGE veggies in her patch of the garden.

ella in her overalls, gardening hat, and mud boots….ready to garden!

ella with her new wheelbarrow thinking “boy, we have a LOT of work to do!”

yikes, that title sounds like there should be kids lining up for blood tests or something…

Autumn has been working hard putting together a video of her experience with her mom, Pete, Molly, Eileen, Pat, and Dave (from the minnesota dnr) checking in on a mama bear and her cub. She’ll have to post the full story, but it was an impressive day, just last saturday, the 8th. They were in the woods for 5 hours, mostly standing around keeping a 6 lb bear cub warm and helping move around the 240 lb mama bear.

On that day, in Grand Rapids, MN, it was -5 F. Today, in St. Paul, it was 60 F.

We had a screening of the final 20-minute video for a few friends tonight. The video turned out very nice; Autumn did a great job editing and she spent a lot of time working with the sound to level out the very loud and clear voice of whoever was filming at the time, and the very quiet voice of the bear expert.

It was also the first DVD we created, mostly because the film project was too large to copy to the laptop for the screening (via projector). We’re working on a finished version of the DVD for family distribution, complete with out-takes and the short online version of the video (and maybe more, if we can figure out how).

Oh, and the movie is called “tchuck 2201″ because Autumn’s dad’s name is Terrence Charles, so one of his nicknames is tchuck (at least with Pat). He couldn’t make the trip but made the winning bid that let them go on the trip, so he got the honorary name. 2201 was the number on the ear tag that the cub got during the exam.

ella has recently become quite skilled at is pretending. she has been playing with her dolls and animals, often having them talk to one another. last week she declared herself a baby turtle and said she needed to eat crab, just like a sea turtle. today, she carefully explained to her elmo doll all about the mama, papa, and baby bear puzzle that she likes to play with. tonight before bed, she said she was a baby kitten. “meow meow meow meow meow”…this went on for a good 5 minutes or so. for her 2nd birthday, we are getting her a doll house. she’s been very interested in having houses for her dolls and animals, so hopefully she will have endless hours of pretending with her new doll house.