New skills

Eliana has some new tricks to show the world.

The first is cartwheels. She is amazing at them--we hope you'll be as amazed as we were when you watch this video.

That was an incredible cartwheel, huh? We were amazed--and confused--when she first showed us her cartwheel. It took a little digging to figure out what she was trying to do.

She also has a special technique for "spinning." She puts her arm around her and then spins. Maybe to get more momentum?

Eliana loves pretending. She sometimes pretends to be her music teacher, or the librarian that we know well, or Mama Bear (from Berenstein Bears), or she'll pretend to be "Mom" (i.e. Emily). One night, she was pretending that she was a cat.

This past week, on a trip to Ikea, Eliana got clothes for her favorite stuffed animal, Go-go the cat. Clifford the dog also got an outfit.

A new twist during nap time was that Eliana wanted to take a nap in the living room instead of her bed. She had the idea of using her pillow from upstairs, and asked/demanded that Emily fetch it for her and then promptly fell asleep without the usual 20 min. to 1 hour of delay tactics!

Eliana also likes playing soccer. Because it's still mostly rainy, she's confined to indoor soccer. But one can't play soccer unless one is wearing shorts and a short-sleeve shirt. So she runs upstairs and changes into her soccer outfit before coming back down to play--much to the delight of Karina.

Eliana continues being a good big sister and only occasionally snatches Karina's toys away. When we catch her doing that, she gets a reprimand and a threat of going to time out. (Although the "time outs" are diminishing in effectiveness as a punishment, we've been noticing lately.)

Because Karina officially eats meals with the rest of the family, Eliana is interested in feeding her sister as well as eating Karina's special foods. We give her baby rice crackers, which Eliana begs to have as well.

Karina has started learning how to suck on a sippy cup. Eliana is glad to assist.

So Karina continues to grow. She has started making "g" sounds again, after a long hiatus of only yelling and doing impressions of dinosaur sounds.
A couple of weeks ago, we got a bit of snow again. Although the predicted 3-6 inches didn't pan out, we did get a couple of inches. Eliana, of course, wanted to be out where all the snow was. She had a great time exploring and playing in the snow. She built another snowman, not that much taller than her first one. Also, Elvin took a 2 hour lunch break from work that day so that he could take Eliana sledding. Unfortunately, we don't have any good hills near our house. So Elvin got the lucky job of being the pack animal pulling the sled.