7 years of ella

if the WAY ella came into this world, was any indication of HOW she would LIVE her life... i should have braced myself way back then... for a WILD and CRAZY ride!

that little turbo-child came barreling into this world four weeks early at a very fast pace... fast enough, that i drove myself to the hospital, thinking i was in false labor, only to find out it was the real-deal! luckily, matt made it there with about an hour to spare and the doctor made it there just in time to catch her!

life with ella has been a supersonic journey ever since! she started walking when she was only 8 months old! {...get that? 8 months!} she was so little, it didn't even look right!

she was a little slow picking up her speech due to chronic ear infections, but once she had tubes put in her ears at 12 months old, she suddenly became a chatterbox... in fact, she became a very loud chatterbox! there are times that she talks so much and so loud that she literally wears us right out! now don't get me wrong... she's a fun one to be around... always bubbly and quite full of it... but as her mother who is around her more than anyone else, i'll be the first to admit there are times that i wish i had a cute little muzzle to put on that girl!

she's always singing... whether she's in the shower, on the toilet, laying in her bed at night, brushing her teeth {yeah... we haven't figured that one out either} or playing barbies... whatever the occasion, she is a singing nut!

that's why we decided to fulfill her dream of owning a lovely pink guitar... and got her one for her 7th birthday! {now, when she's strumming and singing at the top of her lungs... into the microphone that we also bought her... matt just glares at me with this awful look on his face like, "what in the heck were we thinking??"}

but since she's a huge taylor swift & miley cirus fan, and hopes to grow up and be a rock star someday, i figure this is a great way to keep her positively entertained right? {who cares if we need to start investing in some good ear-plugs!} besides, she even wrote her first song after her friends all left and if you ask me, it was pretty creative and had a good little tune to it!

i don't know how i got so lucky this year, but when i asked ella what she wanted for her birthday treat, she didn't request some really creative, funky cake that i have absolutely no business making in the first place! {i was not blessed with any talent in the sweet and cute baking department like my mother was! i swear, that woman could make life-size cakes of cats, and guitars and trains if we wanted her to! not me, that's for sure!}

anyhoo, ella just wanted brownies served with vanilla ice-cream and carmel topping! simple enough eh? so matt was a sweetheart and made the brownies, ella shaped the candles in a seven and that was that! nothing fancy, but hey... it's what the girl wanted!

ella's birthday party was a pajama party, with her cousins and closest friends from first grade. she originally had a list a mile long of girls she wanted to invite, but for my own sanity's sake, i made her shorten the list to only a small handful of girls! after all the normal things you do at parties, {open gifts, play games, eat pizza, blow out the candles, have brownies & ice-cream}, all the girls gathered together on the bean-bags, snuggled up with their pillows and blankies and watched a christmas movie together while they ate pop-corn.

it was a fun night... watching ella celebrate to her hearts content... singing songs to her friends... jumping up and down... screaming louder than she normally does... {oh bless our poor little ears! even our dog was over-stimulated and wanted to go outside!} she definitely is a fun and spunky little girl! one who blesses our lives immensely and powerfully!

and thinking back on that perfect day seven years ago, when i gave birth to that tiny little quiet baby... had i known then, what i know now... i probably would have video taped a LOT more of those hushed moments in her life - because they are rare and isolated moments that are few and far between. seriously unfamiliar territory for our little ella and something we don't see too often!

but hey... that's actually one of the things we love the MOST about her!

happy birthday ella bella!

third time's the charm

you know that sound, when your kid is screeching & squealing at the top of their lungs, and it's hard to tell exactly whether or not it's coming from sounds of delight or expressions of pure horror?

well, that's exactly the sound matt and i heard the other day as ella was running into the house on her way home from school. i tagged it right away as sobbing, but matt thought for sure she was laughing. {i'll give you one guess as to who was right. yup. it was me! must be those motherly instincts i've got!}

as ella ran in the front door, she had a bloody hand covering her chin as she yelled with pure panic in her voice, "i'm NOT going to the doctor and i'm NOT going to get stitches!"

let me just give you a little background on ella. during her entire first year of life, she had chronic ear infections and it seemed as though we were constantly at the doctor's office. her ears were almost always feeling pain, and they would often have to pin her down to check them... causing ella to feel like doctors and nurses were continuously against her. when she was 12 months old, she had to get tubes in her ears and the entire thing was very traumatic for her. since then, she hates... and i mean HATES going to the doctor. it's so bad, that our pediatrician had to finally prescribe her valium - even if i'm just taking her to a well-visit appointment!

when i finally convinced ella to take her hand off her chin so i could see what the damage was, i couldn't believe what i saw! not only did i see a very wide, very disgusting wound, but it was in the exact same spot where she cut her chin open and had to get stitches back when she was 2 1/2 years old! {or at least i thought it was!} that's when i started to panic.

matt took over at that point. he cleaned the area, stopped the bleeding and tried to calm her down. that's when he discovered that this lovely little injury, was about two millimeters away from her original scar! {nice!}

since ella was screaming at the top of her lungs, "i'm NOT going to the doctor... i HATE doctors... you can't MAKE me go to the doctor..." matt and i had to resort to communicating through eye signals so she couldn't hear what we were saying. i gave him the big-eyed questioning look, "do i need to call the doctor's office to ask if we can take her in?" and in return, he gave me the eye-ball blink and nod "heck yeah... this sucker is too deep to heal on it's own. let's take her in!" it was secret communicating at it's best!

i emptied out the medicine cabinet, trying to find the valium, and to my dismay it was nowhere to be found. {we must have used it all on previous doctors visits!} unfortunately, that meant taking her to the doctors office with her FULL awareness! {dang... that's never pretty!}

when we got to the doctors office, ella was their only patient since they were just about ready to leave for the day. and it was probably a good thing too, since she turned into quite a high maintenance little patient!

since our pediatrician was out for the day, we had to explain to the "newbie" doctor that ella requires a LOT of drugs to calm her down during the stitches procedure. {this is ella's third time getting stitches on her face... so we've been around the block a time or two when it comes to this stuff!} she's definitely one that needs to be knocked out cold!

but since she only needed three stitches, the doctor seemed to want to test the waters out without knocking her out completely. ohhh... but did ella have a different plan in store for him or what?! he learned very quickly that ella can be quite a little beast when she feels threatened in the doctors office! she nearly gave him a right hook as he came closer to her chin and yelled "NO! you can't give me stitches!"

we just used our silent eye communication with the doctor, and laughingly said "told-ya-so!"

he surprisingly, humbly, and almost apologetically told us that he would order a shot of versed to knock ella out so we could carry on with the procedure. unfortunately, we should have thought to tell the doctor that "silent eye communication" works best when the beast comes out in ella... because once she heard the word "shot"... she went absolutely wild!

she informed us that she was going to leave us there and go home whether we liked it or not... she swore that she'd never ever get stitches in her chin... and she reassured us that if we loved her, we wouldn't have taken her to the doctor in the first place!

when the nurse finally came in with the shot needle and said that she needed to have access to the top of ella's thigh, ella bent in half and yelled, "NO! i will NOT take my pants off!" she cried. she started to sweat. her face turned red. she grabbed a hold of the button on her pants and would not let go. matt and i tried to reason with her. we did our best to calmly talk to her. we made an effort to explain things on her level... but nothing worked. time was wasting and we needed to get a move on, so i started to tug on her pants. she looked at me with angry eyes, and then kicked me hard! {i'll admit... it was at this point i was really wishing i hadn't run out of the valium back at the house!}

after about 20 minutes, you could definitely see that ella was feeling a little funny. her body was less tense and she was slowing down, but she was still very determined NOT to get stitches. she insisted however, that matt let go of her so she could try walking around since she felt so dizzy, but we reassured her that most likely, that would end in the result of needing even more stitches!

when the doctor finally came in, had her lay on the table and figured she'd be ready. this time however, she tried to give him a left hook and swiftly said, "no! what are you doing! you can't give me stitches!" the look on the doctors face was classic! he was surprised to say the least. he told us that he'd like to order another dose of versed, since the first dose obviously wasn't strong enough for her stubbornness.

this time around, they had to strap a heart rate and oxygen monitor on her foot... just to make sure things didn't go wrong since she was getting such a high dose of sedatives in her system.

our cute little headstrong daughter, however, hung on tight and gave this stitches battle the fight of her life! although the room was spinning and she kept asking us where we were going... as soon as the doctor came in and prepped her chin for the procedure, she jumped a mile the second he got close to her! again, he was shocked! {the poor doctor! he's just fresh to this practice from primary children's hospital, so you would think this would be nothing new to him... but he was surprised to say the least!}

we figured the third time would be the charm, so he ordered a dose of ketamine this time... to really knock her down! {poor girl!} the nurse prepared me that it might be scary to see my daughter drugged this heavily... although she was acting so strange at this point, i was ready for just about anything. they gave her the shot, and within three minutes, she was like a zombie, mumbling her words and eyes zig-zagging every which way. ugh. it was an awful state to see her in.

but... guess what! it sure got the job done! the doctor was finally able to come in and get the deed done! {whew! in fact, it was a double whew!}

of course, once those THREE little stitches were finally in place, that meant we had to wait for our tenacious child to wake up! {this is where the fun begins!}

as soon as she started coming out of her deep sleep, she would ask in completely mumbled, jumbled up words, "where am i?" or "am i getting staples in my chin?" or if she looked down at her foot and saw the bandage with the heart monitor wrapped around it, she would ask, "did i break my foot?" oh... it was funny! the best was when she would try to focus her eyes on us and then she would suddenly jerk her eyes toward the ceiling and with slurred words say "whoa! look at that! the light is shooting that way!"

it was weird, and a little bit freakish to see her that way, but we couldn't help but laugh and giggle at the funny things she was saying. she would ask us the same things over and over and over again! she'd tell us that we had three eyes or wondered why we moved her to a new room. {we didn't.} nic & his best friend braden, kept calling her on my cell phone to ask her question after question, because they thought her random, off the wall answers were so funny that they would just laugh their heads off! {boys!}

on a side note here... i have to say that it was absolutely wonderful having matt with me there the whole time to be the calm and stable rock through the whole situation! i was blessed that this little accident happened on an afternoon when matt was home, because had i had to do this all alone, i think i might have had a nervous breakdown! he was actually just getting ready to go to work {hence: his scrubs} and took over just when i started to panic. {i can tell this being married to a nurse thing is going to work out quite well!}

a funny thing happened when we first sat down and started talking to the doctor: ella piped in and firmly said, "my dad is a nurse and if i have to get stitches in, i want HIM to do it!" {oh for heavens sakes! he's not even an LPN yet!} ha ha ha!

well, as you can see by the length of this blog post, these three little stitches caused quite an ordeal. we were at the doctors office for almost three entire hours - with them taking care of us the whole time! this is the THIRD time ella has had to get stitches... and for some reason, she always has to get them on her face!

the first time was from a fall in the bathtub when she was 2 1/2 years old and like i said earlier, was on her chin, just a few millimeters away from this injury. the second time was when a neighbor boy threw an arrow toward her face, and split her lip open when she was 4 years old. so since they say the third time's the charm, i'm hoping that this is it for a while! maybe ella will be STITCH FREE for a good long time! {i'm crossing my fingers... and my toes... and my eyes!}

here is ella, all stitched up... and happy the next day, retelling the story of how her scooter decided to jump up and bite her in the chin as she was riding home from school the previous day! no... she didn't even fall, she didn't even crash. she just hit a bump in the road and the scooter jumped up and took a bite out of ella!

and then for some good laughs, here is ella back when she was only 2 1/2 years old, sporting the same old chin accessory... a nice big band-aid... covering up those lovely three stitches that she fought and fought to never get, but had to get anyway! {man alive... sometimes i wonder if i gave birth to a mule! if so, at least she's a CUTE mule! sigh...}

... and i think that officially completes the longest story EVER about someone getting 3 little old stitches! ha ha!

blank calendar

check out my exciting purchase for today! my 2010 desk calendar that is entirely blank! this might sound strange, but i have a thing for "BLANK THINGS"... blank calendars, blank notebooks, blank journals, blank checks! to me, they are just an adventure waiting to happen!

some might say that i'm sill living in the dinosaur ages because my life is organized on a ginormous paper calendar and not in some fancy little iphone that i can carry around in my purse... but i have a confession to make. i have a "thing" for my calendar! sometimes, after i've filled it all in with appointments, birthdays, vacations, and special occasions, i like to just sit back and stare at it for a few minutes. {sigh} it gives me such a sense of purpose... and a spirit of challenge! yes... my $3 calendar really brings warm fuzzies to my heart!

i'm already starting to wonder what will happen in 2010... even though my calendar is beginning to fill up with things to do and places to go, i can't help but be curious about what the new year will bring. any guesses?

new indulgence

these are our new favorite things at our house! PUMPKIN pancakes! Mmmm... they are seriously so delicious! go HERE for the recipe.

disneyland... our last day

we saved going to toon-town for the last day we were at disneyland. that meant the cameras were on "ready... aim... fire..." alert nearly all day long! you can go nuts in toon-town with photo-op's! here are the girl cousins all together with minnie!

oh how sad... abbie, nic, ella and sydney must have been naughty to be stuck in jail like that!

and who knows what julie and richard were thinking when they choreographed this little stunt? they just ran up and told everybody what to do and how to do it! ha ha ha! looks nice though! maybe we should bronze them all and try to get water spouting out their mouths?!

and here i am just chilling with my in-laws and my kids. dee and diane were the ones who paid for everybody to come on this trip. the ENTIRE trip! they are so generous and kind and we are so grateful for them and their kindness for all that they do for us! they really are such awesome parents, grandparents and in-laws and we are so lucky to have them in our lives! thanks guys for this awesome adventure you have given us!

just some more silly pictures in tune town of the gas pumps... which i think are absolutely adorable... and then of me trying to show off my big old muscles! {yeah right!} i've definitely got to put that picture on my fitness blog don't you think?

outside of toon-town, there we are back at the castle again. and although i hate to admit it... without matt around, the kids seemed to like me more and wanted to be with me more than when he was around! {ha ha!} what i mean by that is this: look at that picture with them both holding my hands walking with me side by side. we walked around disneyland like that a ton after he left! prior to him leaving, it wasn't like that at all... and on every single ride, they were fighting over who got to sit next to HIM... never over who got to sit next to ME! i started getting a complex and wondered if they thought i was chopped liver or something! but once he was gone, it was not like that at all. i totally understand why they are like that with their daddy... and i wouldn't have it any other way... but let's be honest... as their mommy, sometimes it's nice to be wanted too! and on this particular day, when we were walking all around disneyland - with their hands in mine - it sure felt nice to finally be the one who was wanted!

for the most part, we had not had to deal with very long lines during our trip to disneyland. however... here we are waiting to board the brand new toy story ride, which also happened to be our longest wait ever... which was about 45 minutes! sounds long right? well, well, well... it was totally and completely worth it! it is the funnest ride ever! if you are going to california adventures in the near future... i highly recommend this ride!

and finally, here we are again - in front of california adventures - on our last day! this picture was a hard one for me to convince everyone to do... but after a quick reminder to the "stubborn ones" about the loving little lecture i had with them on the first day about "why we take pictures and how they bring us so much joy later on in life" they were smiling and happy to cooperate! {ahh... the power of persuasion!}

i still wish my man was with me in these pictures... but i know he was off doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing! and hey... at least the kids and i had a great time making fabulous memories with his family right? we certainly had an amazing time on this family vacation all together with the rosenbaum family. it was the first time we have done something so big and so fun like this together! and the funny thing was... we didn't get sick and tired of each other the way you might think we would! ha ha! in fact, as soon as we got home to utah, my kids wanted to play with their cousins immediately... as if they didn't see enough of each other on the six days while we were with them on vacation! go figure!