Future Aerobics Instructor

Happy Ash Wednesday!

Ellie's House

The camera drama continued this week, but I think I've resolved everything. I hope. As it turns out, the previously owned camera that I was using didn't have a flash that was operating at 100%. The camera would work if I was outside, but if I wanted to use it inside, I was going to have to buy an accessory flash. I tried taking it to several places to figure out how to make it work, but it was going to have to be repaired. So I sent it back and luckily the lady I bought it from was nice enough to take it back. Sort of a bummer because I liked the camera a lot. That left me with no camera again. So on Saturday, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase a brand new Canon EOS Rebel XS. I actually only had to purchase half of it because my parents were nice enough to pay for the other half as a late Christmas gift. So now I have my dream camera. And it works. And it takes the great pictures I've always wanted out of a camera. And I'm going to love it forever or at least until I leave it at the mall again. Just kidding, Lee. I won't do that.

After we got home from swimming lessons on Saturday, Ellie had a surprise waiting for her in the backyard. The sister-in-law of my co-worker, Jennifer, was looking to get rid of her daughter's play house so on Saturday, Lee and Jennifer's husband, Andy, picked up the play house and brought it over to our house. When we rounded the corner of the house and Ellie saw it, she sat in her stroller for a second speechless and then started screaming "Out! Out! Out!" for me to unbuckle her so she could play with it. She loves it. The only problem is that it's a bit hard to get her into the car in the morning because she sees it and wants to stay outside playing in "Ellie's house". That's what she calls it. I need to get her a little tea set so she can play house in it. Right now she runs in and out opening and closing the door and the windows.

My parents came over on Saturday and we went to the park to fly a kite. I bought a Sesame Street kite and was so excited about Ellie's first kite flying outing, but she was pretty uninterested. She was interested when the kite was on the ground and she liked the green tail attached to the end of it, but once it made its way into the air, she ran off. Out of sight, out of mind. So we made our way to the playground after about 5 minutes of kite flying. She is so over the little kid playground equipment and only wants to play on the park equipment that is designed for children five and older. This causes me anxiety, but she prefers the big slide much more now.

Saturday night my parents kept Ellie at their house while Lee and I went to Fort Worth to celebrate Katy's birthday at Cantina Laredo with about 14 other friends. Before dinner, Lee and I stopped at Wine Thief, the wine bar in the brand new Omni hotel. It was really nice and I had a great time at dinner catching up with everyone. Sunday we met one of Lee's high school friends from Chattanooga for lunch at Mi Cocina. She, her husband and her three kids were in town from Boston for a wedding. Ellie had her usual - a quesadilla - and surprised us when we asked her to say it and she could repeat it. It's funny hearing her little voice say "quesadilla". She can also put back on her shoes now... she's been taking them off for a while, but now in the mornings I get her all the way dressed except for her shoes and tell her to put them on. And she does it. I really like this picture I took on Saturday at the park - I think it's one of my favorites.

Valentine's Weekend 2009

I'm starting to think that 90% of good picture taking is having a good camera and the basic knowledge of how to use it. I snapped two pictures of Ellie at the park this weekend that are two of the better pictures I've taken of her in a while. Of course, it took me about 100 pictures to get these two, but I guess that's the beauty of digital photography. It's also nice to have a subject who is too young to scream, "Stop taking my picture, mom!".

Not much to report this weekend. It was Valentine's Day on Saturday. I'm not really a big celebrator of the holiday so we mostly stuck around the house. We had swimming lessons again on Saturday morning and my mom came to watch and she took some pictures. My dad was busy performing singing Valentine telegrams which he does every year with his singing group to raise money for Cooks Children's Hospital. Here's Ellie reaching for the stars - literally. You might not be able to tell, but she is kicking. I discovered a more advanced program taught by a private lady so I may start Ellie in those lessons this summer or even earlier. It would be nice if Ellie could swim to the side of the pool by herself.

That afternoon, I took Ellie to the park and then we stayed here for Valentine's Day dinner. Lee and I made a pact not to get each other gifts, but I went ahead and got a gift for both of us - Coldplay tickets. They're coming back in concert on July 21. The radio station Mix 102.9 was giving them away all week to the 20th caller, but I was every caller BUT the 20th. I was the 19th twice. This is the radio station that I won a ski trip from 4 years ago. It seems my luck for winning radio contests is slipping a bit.

In other Ellie news, she gave me her first unsolicited "thank you" this week. Since she started talking, I've been trying to teach her to say "please" and "thank you". Usually I have to prompt her for one or the other, but this week as we were getting ready for school, I handed her a cup of milk and she gave me a "sank ooh". Very cute.

My Best Friend

I was practicing with the settings on my new camera tonight and got some pictures of Ellie with her best friend...

Ellie LOVES the baby that I got her for her first birthday. She treats Baby like a real baby. As you can see, she blows her nose.

She reads to her.

Then she and Baby read to us.

Then she puts baby to bed.

She's already a good mom!

Our Grocery Getter

I got it!

Our blog is picture perfect again! I purchased a "new" camera this week. Actually, it's second hand, but that makes it new to me. I really wanted a super fancy new Canon Rebel SLR camera, but I decided that it would be a good idea for me to purchase a second hand one first for practice for a few years. And the one I got is perfect... it's just not the total latest and greatest technology. But that's okay. It's a great learning camera. I've always been really interested in photography, but have never made any steps to become a better photographer. Now I have and I'm really happy about it. I've got a book and I'm learning and I may even take a class once I exhaust the "SLR Camera for Dummies" book. So over the next year or so, you'll see my progression of photo skills... at least I hope that I progress!

The pictures I have on this blog are from a few nights ago when Ellie was feeding her fish. I really haven't had a chance to take many pictures outside of that lately. We started swimming lessons again this weekend, but I couldn't take pictures because I was in the water. Minor detail to taking pictures. Every time we go to the gym, Ellie has to go see the pool. I always have to keep one had on the back of her shirt just in case she has an immediate urge to swim. But I underestimated Ellie's excitement for the water. I got her dressed in her suit and walked her out to the pool, but once she realized that we were actually getting into the pool, she started screaming and squealing. Her favorite thing to do now is crawl out of the pool and jump back to me. Again and again. She gets these crazy eyes when she's about to jump so I was getting a kick out of watching her. I've never seen her so excited about something and I mean that. All of this excitement caused her to take a 2.5 hour nap.

I practice swimming strokes with her by throwing something out in front of her and then have her use her arms to pull it toward her. She's been putting together one or two words lately, but she's yet to make a full sentence. That changed on Saturday. I threw a football out in front of her and she grabbed it. I said, "did you get it?". She excitedly replied, "I got it!". I don't know if I was more happy that her swimming stokes were spot on or that she made a full sentence.

Other than the swimming lesson, we actually had a pretty busy weekend. I attended the Junior League's Volunteer fair this weekend and worked at a booth with my friend Elizabeth answering questions for a while. Then that night, we attended a wedding for our friends David and Amy. It was a beautiful wedding and instead of leaving the reception by the usual limo or classic car, the couple decided to leave the wedding via helicopter amidst fireworks. We weren't there to see it because the party wrapped up at midnight and we left around 11:00, but I heard it was spectacular.

It was also Ben's birthday last Wednesday, so we met for lunch at El Phoenix on Sunday to celebrate. Afterwards, we drove around looking at houses. We can't quite decide if we want to remodel the house we're in or move. Both are stressful decisions. I have to shut this down because I hear the tornado sirens going off. Hope we're not blown away!

Happy 2009!

Happy new year to everyone and yes, the sentiment is a full month late. If 2009 continues the way it's started, I'm going to buy a DeLorean, build a flux capacitor, and go back to 2008. I actually started this post 2 weeks ago, but just never got around to finishing it. And then the pressure built to write this enormous blog and I kept putting it off. But no more. I am back to blogging after this. One of the reasons I haven't been blogging is because I've been so busy but the other reason is because I lost my camera. We went to the Galleria about 3 weeks about to have dinner with the Hardemans and afterwards, we went to the third floor to the play area. As I was putting Ellie's shoes on to leave, I took the camera off my wrist and put in on the bench next to me. Ellie ran off and I jumped up to run after her and that was it. It was gone. I realized that I didn't have it on the way back to the house so I called the security office, but no. So all of the pictures in this post are courtesy of Stephanie since she did get some of Ellie that night. But the good news is that I bought another one so new pictures are on the way. Really and truly, I am back to blogging.

So what have we been doing... Ellie has two new pets. We are now the proud owners of two goldfish named Dorothy and NoNo. We bought a little 2-gallon aquarium for our new friends too. For those Sesame Street fans out there, you probably know that Elmo has a pet goldfish named Dorothy. So of course Ellie had to name one of the fish Dorothy. I have no clue why she named the other fish NoNo. I think she might have named it that in homage to her favorite word. She stands on her little stool and watches them swim and occasionally she tries to feed them a cracker through the glass.

She's been quite a character lately. About two weeks ago, we put Ellie to bed and I thought she had gone to sleep, but she started swalking after an hour. I went into her room to find her sans pajamas - but still in a diaper - thank goodness. I guess she's woken up and gotten undressed? We'll never know, but I was more than a little confused when I walked in the room and she handed me a pair of pajamas and I found a naked Ellie. We were a birthday party for Cooper, her school friend, last weekend and Ellie tried to jump in the pool. It was covered with a mesh leaf cover, but she still tried getting in. This resulted in a very wet Ellie since the pool cover only prohibited her from sinking and not from getting wet. I think she is very excited about swimming this summer because this afternoon I found her in her bathroom playing in her toilet (the real one) screaming "pool!!". If you know how much I am bothered by germs then you know how much this bothers me. We had to have the "potty is only for poo-poo and tee-tee" talk AGAIN. She's also learning new words exponentially and putting them together more. Like today I cut myself chopping onions so I put a bandage on my finger. She saw it and I told her that I was hurt and she pointed to my finger and said "mommy hurt". Or when I "forgot" to replace the batteries in her Elmo Live for a few days she would tell me "Elmo night-night". Yes, that's right, Ellie. Your very annoying talking animal is sleeping.

What else has happened... I hosted dual showers last weekend. A group of girls hosted a morning wedding shower at Meg's house for Bonnie and then in the evening we hosted a baby shower for Meg. I am learned that I am going to be on the Junior League's Leadership Council next year as the Technology Chair. Very excited about that one. I've been touring new schools for Ellie. I think where she is right now is okay but I may want to put her someplace else.

My good friend and college roommate Debbie had her second baby this week, a little girl named Sadie Scott. The delivery was fine, but Sadie was born with a genetic condition called Pfeiffer Syndrome that effects the appearance of her skull and eyes. She's going to have to have several surgeries, the first of which will be coming up in the next week or so. They've set up a site so that we can follow her progress. It's called Sadie's Site. I added it to my list of "Links" on the sidebar too. Debbie is such an amazing person and if God had told me he had a very special baby and asked me who should be her mother, I would have told him Debbie would be the best person for the job. I am asking that everyone pray for Sadie and for the Bono family.

Christmas 2008

If there's one thing I learned this Christmas, it's that being the first and only grandchild on both sides of the family means you score huge in the gift department. On Christmas Eve, we met the Brights at St. Michael's for the children's service in the basement. Ellie has a Little People Nativity Set and a book about Christmas that we've been reading, but she obviously hasn't figured out the whole birth of Jesus thing yet. She knows there was a baby, a star, an angel, and a donkey involved, but that's about it. After church, we went back to the Brights for dinner and opening presents. We let Ellie open all of hers first since she had to go to bed. Once she figured out that she was the recipient of many gifts, she started going nuts and screaming "Ooooooo!!" as she opened each gift. She got two babies, a stuffed doggie, some blocks, crayons, a puzzle, and a beautiful bracelet. Uncle Ben set up the train set which was a big hit with Ellie. It only took Ellie two hours to go to sleep... then the adults opened gifts downstairs.

We woke up at our house on Christmas morning. Santa brought Ellie a ride-on Elephant and an Elmo live. She really likes the elephant. It sings four different songs while she rocks on it. We made it over to my parents by 11AM where there were more festivities and she hit the motherload with the Elmo Restaurant, a gift from Grammie and Grandi. She LOVES the Elmo Restaurant. She saw it and immediately started cooking up a storm and has not stopped cooking since she received it. She has taken to putting her new baby in the oven which is troublesome, but maybe she thinks it's nice and dark for baby in there. She also likes handing out the money in the register to everyone.

We spent the afternoon of the 26th at the Dallas Museum of Nature and Science and the next day, we saw the Trains at Northpark. It is a nerd paradise of miniature trains. That have the trains running through scenes of Dallas, New York City, Washington DC, a forest, and a western town among other things. Ellie really enjoyed it and they had some trains at her level . Mom and I saw the movie Doubt on Saturday afternoon. It's getting lots of nominations for awards and such but it was sort of slow and disturbing.



Lee and I spent Sunday surveying what Ellie does and doesn't play with and making two piles - save and give to charity. The problem is that I would get something out she hadn't played with in six months and she'd act like it was the long lost toy she'd been missing and start playing with it. Half of her stuffed animals are getting the boot. Sometimes I wish we lived in the 1800s when children had a corn husk doll and a block of wood to play with. And they liked it. Now everything makes noise, is the size of a baby hippopotamus, and requires 4-AA batteries which have to be inserted using a Stewart Little-sized screwdriver.

So here we are at the end of 2008 and I am exhausted. I think I aged 5 years in the past 7 days. I feel like I'm recovering from Spring Break 1997 without all of the beer, vinyl pants, dance offs, and midgets. I don't know how I'm going to do it year after year... and especially the years when Ellie starts getting up at 5AM. When that starts, I'm going to stay in bed, set up the camcorder, and tell her to hit record when she gets up. At least I have 11 months to get geared up for the next season.

The Bright Family wishes you a happy and healthy 2009!

The Science Place

I took the day off the day after Christmas and Lee took the afternoon off, so after Ellie's nap, we took her to The Museum of Nature and Science in Fair Park. In the downstairs area, they have a ton of things for little ones to do. She loved driving the fire engine with Dad....

Picking veggies at the little farm...

Milking cows...

Harassing turtles...

Sailing boats...
It's all fun and games until we have to leave.

Poor Ellie.

December Events

I have to get a post in before Christmas or else I will be totally behind and stuck writing a 10,000 word essay on December 31. I'll start with Deck the Hall, the annual children's Christmas concert at the Meyerson on December 13. We went last year and Ellie had a great time then, but an even better time this year. Dallas native Lisa Loeb was the entertainer. We started off with Breakfast With Santa which included a picture with Santa. That didn't go well. Ellie had NO interest in meeting Santa. We have Santa all over the house so she knows who he is and she'll even say "Ho! Ho! Ho!" if you asks her what Santa says, but was not so interested in actually meeting him. I expect that this behavior will continue until she's about 3 or 4.

After breakfast, there was a lot of great lobby entertainment. Ellie enjoyed listening and dancing to a one-man band, watching a magician, getting a reindeer balloon hat made, and was particularly interested in watching a string quartet play. By the time the concert started, Ellie was operating at a level 10. She sat fairly still during the concert, but was ready to get out of there when it ended at noon. Too much stimulation.

Front row at for the one man band.

The String Quartet.

She's had enough of Decking the Halls.

When we got home, she was being pretty cranky so I fed her and put her down for a nap - which she would have none of. It marked the first time she's never taken a nap during the day and it's not something she's going to repeat anytime in the near future. I tried for 1.5 hours to get her to go to sleep... patting her back, singing, more books, and at one point I rocked her which is not easy any more because she's 5'6" now. So eventually we got up and made the cookies that I wrote about in the last post. That night we met our friends, the Hardemans, for dinner. Ellie and Cooper kissed each other on the lips when we left and I about fell over I started laughing so hard.


This past week, we celebrated the holidays with more fun - I met my college girlfriends Meg, Debbie, Annie, Bonnie, Jenny, and Kristine, for dinner and an ornament exchange at Olenjack's in Arlington on Tuesday night and then Ellie and I went to the Dallas Women's Club with Beth and Elizabeth for a Mother-Daughter-Granddaughter Tea. Santa came down from the North Pole again for the Tea and again Ellie was steadfast in her determination not to take a picture with him. She was much more interested in the ladies in a little band that was playing Christmas music. They brought instruments for the kids to play with and Ellie had fun shaking a tambourine.

We met my parents at the Gaylord Texan on Saturday morning to see the Ice! exhibit. It is a hugh exhibit of ice sculptures... really a lot more interesting than it sounds. They had a 15 foot slide... which Ellie could not ride because she wasn't tall enough, a giant Santa, a huge angel, gingerbread men, and a life sized nativity scene. The only problem is that they kept the entire exhibit at 9 degrees. That's about 60 degrees colder than I like to be. They give a parka to all of the visitors, but it's NINE degrees. My ballet flats didn't hold up. I think Ellie's favorite part of Ice! was jumping into a huge barrel of teddy bears at the end. After lunch, my parents took Ellie home with them because Lee and I were supposed to go to a holiday party on Saturday night, but we hadn't had a free night with no kiddo in... forever... so we decided to stay home. I made chili and Mike came over to watch the final Cowboys game at Texas Stadium which they lost.

I picked Ellie up on Sunday, and according to my Mom and Dad, Ellie was pretty good. She only threw all of her food on the floor once. They kept a lot of my old toys so she has plenty to do when she's there. While I was working around the house on Sunday, I forgot how productive I could be when she's not there. I got 6 hours work done in about 2. And I took a nap and went shopping. But it was strange not having her around and I felt like something was missing the whole time.



I'm really looking forward to Christmas this year because I know Ellie will be excited when she opens her gifts. There's such a small window when children are genuinely excited about Santa, the reindeer, the elves, the gifts, the cookies, the lights, the tree... I am going to soak it all up while it lasts.

Merry Christmas.

Christmas Cookie Time

We did a lot this weekend, but one of the highlights was making cookies with Ellie. My mom always made cut-out cookies with me when I was little so I have been looking forward to making cut-out cookies with my little one almost since the day I found out I was pregnant. I bought the cut-outs even before that. I'd never made cut-out cookies by myself... and by no means would I consider myself a great "baker", but I used the recipe that my mom used when I was little and they were quite good.

I rolled out the dough, cut the cookies, and Ellie decorated them. I was surprised that Ellie really did decorate the cookies. She sprinkled the red and green sugar on the cookies and patted it down like she knew what she was doing. Then we put them in the oven and I turned the oven light on so she could watch them bake. Beth gave us a little snowman cookie jar and she knows just where they are now.

In the end, she discovered that the sprinkles taste the best.