Ellie is THREE

During the week before her birthday, I'll admit that Ellie kind of got a little lost in the shuffle of things. Sadie had her accident exactly a week before, so our attention was elsewhere for awhile to say the least. The other hard thing about the timing of it all was that Sadie got tons of get-well gifts and El was having a hard time understanding why her sister got all the presents when it was supposed to be her birthday coming up. So when the big day came, we decided we really needed to focus on Ellie and put everything else aside (as much as possible) for a day.

When we asked what she wanted to do, her answers were "swing," "go to a movie," and "birthday cake." Pretty easy requests. 

After a yummy breakfast of crepes (the kids' favorite), we headed to the park. Since Sadie was still using her walker, we decided to drive a little ways to go to one of the disability-friendly parks in Cache Valley. It was built with big, wide ramps that Sadie could get up with her walker and it also had the big special needs swings that she could sit in without putting pressure on her hip. And, of course, it had swings for Ellie. It was hot, but the girls had a blast.

After fulfilling Ellie's other request for a movie (Monsters University), we headed home for dinner and cake. Ellie has been talking about her birthday for months and those conversations have almost always included birthday cake. I came really close to just buying a cake from the grocery store this year since things were crazy, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Homemade birthday cakes are kind of our thing, and I didn't want to give up that tradition quite yet. So after some Pinterest perusal, I came up with my own easy version of a Minnie Mouse cake. A lot of pink frosting, some jumbo marshmallows, and some interesting creations from Oreos and colored white chocolate later, we had one Minnie Mouse cake. Despite the fact that the ears collapsed about 5 minutes after I took this picture, it still turned out okay.

Kevin's parents came in time to open presents and have some cake with us. I think E was pretty relieved to finally have some presents of her own to open.

Here are a few other things about the birthday girl at age 3 that should go down in history...

I have stats this time around! At the doctor's, she weighed 31 pounds (55%) and was 36 1/2 inches tall (30%). Pretty close to perfect, in my opinion.

She's obsessed with all things fruit. Her favorites are grapes and watermelon, but she'll pretty much inhale any other fruit I put in front of her. Other food groups are always hit and miss, but fruit is a sure winner every time.

Her favorite movie is Despicable Me. She and Sadie can watch that movie a hundred times and still crack up through the whole thing. I don't blame them - I love it too!

She's a girly-girl just like (or maybe because of?) her sister. She loves to play pretend with the assortment of princesses around our house and I love to stand just outside her view and listen to her little conversations.

She's getting much, much better at speaking, but our doctor still recommended her for speech therapy when we went to her check-up. He said she's basically right on the border, but the fact that she drops the first and last part of many of her words and substitutes certain consonants for others that are harder to say might make her a good candidate. Just for the record, she uses the "t" sound instead of any beginning "s" sound or "f" sound (for example, she calls Sadie "Tadie" or "Tade," silly is "tiwwy," fingers are "tingers") and even for the hard "c" sound. She also says the "d" sound for the "g" sound ("dapes," da-ma"). They say speech can help that stuff pretty quickly, though, so all of that might just be a distant memory soon.

She's currently my little songbird. She frequently makes up her own songs (much of which I usually can't understand since her speech tends to be worse when she sings) and she always jumps right in and tries to sing along whenever I'm singing anything whether it's Primary songs or just along to the radio. I can't get enough of her sweet little voice when she does that.

I've said it before, but the whole speaking thing often makes me underestimate how truly smart she is. I feel like people think she must be behind since she's hard to understand, but it's just the opposite. She tends to hang back and observe situations, too, instead of jumping right in, but I've come to realize that she soaks up a lot when she does that. I guess she's more like me in that way - more of an introvert.

We love this sweet girl and are glad she's made these three years a little bit crazy and a whole lot of fun!