Going on 23 months and counting...

From the Balloon Classic

Ella will be 23 months old on October 6th, than a month after that she will be 2 years old! Seriously were did the time go? She is growing up so fast, I know everyone says that but it really is true.

Ella is starting to speak more clearly and she is using pronouns. She loves to sing any song, all day long. She knows all the songs from the PBS kids shows in the morning, Veggie Tales and loves to sing with daddy for choir. She is getting to be very good at acting out the moves to songs during story time too. Her counting is getting stronger and we are now working on 25-30 of our numbers. She is going great with recognizing ABC's out of order too. She knows most of her shapes and colors as well. She can follow a simple command and loves to help out around the house; heaven forbid I clean without her involvement, lol! She loves to cook to which makes me so happy. I have happy memories of sitting on the counter and helping my mom stir a bowl of cookie batter. Ella loves to help stir and measure and taste. She is so eager to get right into whatever it is am doing in the kitchen and help. I am so glad she knows 'hot' so well, I can open the oven or have her stir something that is on the stove and she knows not to touch or to get too close.

We are working on potty training and it's going so-so. She doesn't wet as often as she use to know so she may only have 3 or so accidents all week long, which isn't enough in a day to really drive home what the point of potty training is. She had a 24 hour stomach bug not to long ago and that put us behind on potty training then when we go to church she still needs to wear a diaper so it's slow going.

With Ella's birthday just around the corner it come me remembering all the events around her birth. I pulled out Ella's birth videos and watched them again. Here is a quick run down of my pregnancy leading up to the birth. I'll share the birth details in another post closer to her birthday.

I remember being sick for the first three months, almost non stop. Going to school and working while being so sick was not easy. At 10 weeks we had an ultrasound done and she moved so much, I could already feel her and tell when she had hiccups. She hardly stayed still long enough to get the measurements done. At 13 weeks I went to the ER for really bad pain that made me double over. I remember that day well, we just had lunch with Chris's aunt and cousins. Who would have known that I would be in the ER less then 5 hours latter. The doctor at the hospital kept saying I had a UTI, but I knew that was wrong. The ultrasound there showed Ella to be supper active. This was great for Chris because he missed the 10 week one, but got to see her now. She was moving more then ever. We never got an answer as to what happened that day till almost a year and a half later. We think she pulled a muscle. I had to waddle and wear a support belt right after this happened, most likely she ripped a muscle and that made my body really weak to carry her on my right side, which of course, is where she spent the next 7 months.

At 20 weeks we got an ultrasound and Ella was butt up, we know she was a girl with out a doubt with in two seconds the ultrasound starting. I knew she was a girl, mommy's intuition is never wrong. She was supper active again but looked great. The word perfect was used to describe her the entire 9 months by all doctors. No one would have guessed what would happen at birth (stayed tune to find out). The rest of the pregnancy was great. I had bad pains from her kicking and moving was hard since she ripped a muscle, but I stayed as active as I could.

On October 26th, Chris's birthday, we celebrated at home. I realized just before we had dinner that I hadn't felt the baby move all day. I drank some juice and ate some candy in hopes that the sugar would make her move. I felt her move 2 times in 30 mins. Time to go to the doctor. .We called the doctor and headed for the hospital. They monitored me and the machine was picking up movement but I couldn't feel a thing. She was kicking my spine and that is why I couldn't feel her. She was slower in her movements than what was normal for her and even for that age. So when I went back to the doctor they did another ultrasound and she was fine, still slow, but fine. A week later I thought I was leaking fluid, so we went back to the hospital again. They checked to see if the fluid was ambiotic fluid and it wasn't. So back home we went again and back to the doctors. We had another ultrasound, we had a total of 6 for the whole pregnancy. This ultrasound showed that I had a lot of fluid, enough for twins.

Stay tuned for what happens next in the saga of Ella's birth...