Plan B, Easter and I love you!!

Can you tell from the title that this is going to be a random, catch-up post? Ha! Last week was a fun week for us. The weather was super nice and Ella has been in a great mood! I have to chalk it up to her ears continue to improve. It makes me mad that we weren't able to help her earlier. It was a pretty miserable 4 months or so for all of us-her, dealing with constant pain and irritation and us, dealing with a generally unhappy girl for a lot of the time! I'm hoping things will keep going up from here!

Friday, my sisters Sarah and Rachel were both off work and home. Since the weather was supposed to be great, we decided to take Ella to the zoo! I guess everyone had the same idea. We figured out pretty quickly that something was going on. Cars were lined up really far back. I decided to zoom past everyone, hoping maybe there was just an accident or that everyone was actually turning before the zoo. Nope! Everyone was in line for the zoo! But when we actually got to the zoo entrance, it was all coned off! I'm really glad we didn't wait in that line for an hour only to find out we couldn't get in! I later found out that we had to park somewhere else and shuttle over. We came up with a Plan B pretty quickly. I'd packed a cooler with sandwiches so we just decided to head over to the Art Museum and see if we could just eat lunch on the grounds there and let Ella play around in the grassy areas. Thankfully, the museum was pretty empty and we were able to have a great time there! Ella loved eating outside and then getting to play.

We started off our Easter festivities by dying...Ella's mouth. I had the Easter Egg painting kit in a cabinet and well, Ella found it...

...you can't tell very well from this picture but her mouth was VERY green, as were her hands, legs and hair! Augh! My first reaction was to find the box to make sure it was nontoxix! It was :) So then I took a picture. And then I cleaned her up. So, that is about as far as we got this year with painting anything. We'll try again next year!

Easter morning was pretty hectic at our house since I had to leave earlier than everyone else for worship practice. As I was leaving the house, Ella was in her highchair eating breakfast. I was saying goodbye and was turning to leave when Ella yelled out "I love you!"-for the very first time!! I've been trying to get her to say that for months it seems but she just clams up and will never say it back to me! So, I was a very happy mama :) Especially since I didn't even say it first, she just said it out of the blue!

And, of course, Easter egg hunting pics! We weren't sure how she would do with this but she did great! She really understood it-we were surprised. Rusty hid 11 eggs and she'd gotten them all in just a few minutes. So we just kept re-hiding them, in the same places even, and she thought it was so fun!