Beautiful Eleanor

I know I’m her mother, so I’m biased, but I think Eleanor is such a beautiful little girl. Her curls and her face and her dimples just kill me sometimes. How in the world did I end up with such gorgeous children? I think she looks a little bit like Audrey Tautou in that middle picture, and she just looks so serene in the last one. I wish she would look at me more often when I try to take her picture.

I have been absolutely terrible about keeping up with milestones on the girls once a month. I’ve still taken their pictures, but then I never post them because I can’t find the time to sit and write all that’s going on with them. I’m thinking I might cut myself some slack and just worry about pictures once a month. Then, if I have some spare time or something in particular to write about, I’ll add that to the pictures. It’s just been too hard to sit down and try to think of every little thing I want to remember, and I end up kicking myself afterward for things I forgot. So I tell myself I’ll write about it next month, and the cycle continues. Oh well.

I have some things I’ve jotted down during the past months that I haven’t written about her. Most of them seem out of date by now, but I’ll write them here so I can remember.

Eleanor got a new car seat way back in February. She was getting way too big for her convertible seat. We let her choose a booster that had LED reading lights. She was so thrilled about it. She calls it her “lighting car seat.”

She has gotten pretty good at matching socks, even some of her dad’s dark ones that all look the same except for subtle differences. I lay a few out on the bed, and then I hand one to her and ask her if it matches any of the socks on the bed. She gets so excited if she finds a match. If she doesn’t find a match, she lays the sock next to the ones on the bed, and I hand her a new one. She even tries to fold the ones she matches, and she’s getting pretty good at it. She can do the method where you fold one top over the other, but balling up the socks is still too difficult for her little hands.

Eleanor often asks me, “After Phaedra grows up, can I have a baby boy?” (as in a brother). I’ve tried to tell her I have no control over that, but she still likes to ask.

Eleanor is really developing some reading and spelling skills. A month or two ago, she would spell out her name on the table with pretzel sticks. Now, we can ask her how to spell simple words like CAT or TENT, and she sounds them out and writes or spells them. She is so proud of herself when she does, too. She can also sound out some basic words when we’re reading books and point to a word.

At breakfast every morning (and this has been going on for many months), after I pour her cereal, Eleanor scoops her cereal away from one spot so that the bottom of the bowl can be seen and asks me to please put the milk in the hole. For some reason, she gets pleasure out of having it that way, and we do it all the time.

Ever since Eleanor had a bout with bad dreams at night (or at least that was her excuse for getting out of bed), we have been praying not to have bad dreams. From the beginning, Eleanor would always bless her friend, Audrey, too. Pretty soon, she was naming off all the kids in her primary class to protect them from bad dreams. After a while of that, she narrowed it back down to just Audrey, Phaedra, and herself again. Since Phae has been listening to that for months, she naturally insists on blessing Audrey during every prayer she says.

Eleanor loves Primary. Just last Sunday, she passed off Article of Faith #13, completing all of her Articles of Faith. Our primary president says she’s going to make a big deal of it this Sunday. I still need to get a video of her doing it. She loves the songs they sing in primary. Right now, the one I hear her sing most at home is “I Know that My Savior Loves Me.” She knows many of the words to that one, but there are other times that she just makes up her own Primary songs. I guess we need to sing them more at home. Here are a couple lines I have heard her sing at separate times while making up her own songs:

“We don’t know where the chapel door is . . . righteously!”

“Jesus taught us to be good. My appetite is good.”

Even when we think she isn’t paying any attention to what we’re teaching her during Family Home Evening, she’ll surprise us by spouting off almost our exact words in some situation the next day.

She has such a fetish for containers. If I leave a cardboard box around the house, she will play with it all day long. She has currently been playing with the same box for about a week now. She makes a bed in it, hides in it, pretends to be a baby chick in it, etc. Also, the other day, Grant set down his laptop case on the couch for a few seconds. When he went back to it, he found that Eleanor had filled it with a bunch of her small toys as if it was a purse.

Sometimes, I am amazed at how low-maintenance Eleanor is. She has such a long attention span. You can set her up with something she enjoys doing, like playing in a sandbox or working on an art project, and she just stays entertained for the longest time. Sometimes she goes to another room in the house to play, and I don’t see her for a long time. I can almost always trust that she isn’t getting into trouble; she’s just doing her own thing. Usually, the thing that puts a stop to that is Phaedra going to her to try to join in or steal a toy. Then, the squawking and shouts of “I need space!” begin.

She is certainly a daddy’s girl. She almost always chooses him over me. That doesn’t bother me because Phaedra is the opposite. Plus, she still shows me plenty of love. She’s a very cuddly girl. She loves to be held, tickled, and wrestled. She tells me she loves me at random times.

I love how quickly she makes friends. We can go to the library, and after a few minutes, she’ll be playing around with kids she’s never met before as if they are life-long friends. If we run into someone she recognizes from church, it doesn’t take long before Eleanor is holding her hand or saying, “Hey, come play over here with me.” I wish kids could stay so innocent and loving longer. I wish they would always be so accepting of each other. Most of all, I hope that my daughter retains that quality of accepting others for a long time. I also hope that she learns to recognize the difference between good and bad influences, so she won’t be a follower to the wrong type of crowd.

For now, she’s still my little girl, happy and sweet. She likes walks and rocks and cardboard boxes. She misses her dog, and tells me, “Don’t worry, someday we’ll get a new dog.” She looks forward to her birthday, and asks me constantly if it is after this month (To which I have to reply, “Well, yes, but it’s not the next month.” Then I name off the months that have to come before it will be her birthday.). She loves to pretend. She spends more than 50% of her time pretending she is a dog. She is beautiful and smart, and I love her. I hope I can give her all the happiness in her childhood that she deserves and teach her everything she needs to know to prepare her for what lies ahead in life.