Grand ambitions.

She's all like, I'm big now, so I'mma go down this big-person slide. As soon as I get up it.

Wait. How did I become sitting?

Maybe if I...

Oh dang...

Here we go.

And so I put a finger through her belt loop and followed her up, because that slide is hella tall.

Some feelings and some mostly unrelated photos.

I'm having a nostalgic moment.

When we first moved to Calgary, we forgot a very vital part of our bedframe, so we couldn't set it up for weeks. This is when Eleanor was still nursing at night, and getting up off a mattress on the floor at 3 am is...I mean, it shouldn't be that much worse but it's SO MUCH WORSE.

We're slowly disassembling our house, and now our mattress is back on the floor and it's making me feel things about my baby.

In other news, we've had a flood. All year, I've been like, I wish I lived in Inglewood, ALL my friends live in Inglewood (except, like, two). And then we had a flood and Inglewood was evacuated, along with maybe 20 other neighborhoods and the entire downtown core.

We were supposed to have a farewell potluck with all those friends in Inglewood, but they were evacuated (you may recall). So even though my kitchen looks like this:

and the contents of my freezer are as follows: pork loin, bag of freezer burritos, half bag of frozen mangoes, we picked up a lasagna and some ice cream and had everyone over here in our DRY, DRY HOUSE one last time.

And it was a great meal because we like them all so much, but it was also SO SAD because we LIKE THEM ALL SO MUCH. The more we hang out with them, the more we like them. They are the kind of dinner guests who will sing with your baby and then stack your dishwasher while you aren't looking. They are kind and funny and smart. Two of them are pregnant. They are an excellent community of people to HAVE and a hard one to LEAVE.

So there's that.

It's how I make her eat her veggies

I let Eleanor 'help' me prep dinner, but she's sometimes pretty starving by that point so occasionally I'll turn my back and when I look again...

You weren't going to use this cucumber, were you? Because I'mma eat it.

You just have to TELL them.

So if your baby's not walking by 18 months, you have to take them to see a specialist. Ain't nobody got time for that.

And, ok, so Morgan and I are the make-your-own-baby-food kind of mothers, but not the ask-your-baby-for-permission-before-you-pick-her-up kind, BUT when Jess wasn't sleeping through the night, Morgan finally had a TALK with her about it, and then Jess went ahead and slept through. So I sat down with Eleanor on Saturday and explained to her that she is big now, and that it's time for her to walk. So she went ahead and did.




Morgan and I are going to write a book. (We're not sure what to do with pages 2 through 195, though.)

Somehow, discovering that she could walk has set off some sort of BOLDNESS gene in her brain. There's a lot more of this in my life in the past three days:

and this

and this

and this

and this

Climbing is hard.

Saskatoon times.

Some other highlights from our trip last week:

Eleanor spent every second in our hotel room trying to put our shoes on.

Like, every second.

The first morning, while Joel was off house-hunting, E and I walked to the closest park, but it ended up being just a pond with some greenery.

So we walked half an hour in the other direction and found this park quite by accident:

And then I turned that fountain that she's sitting under on by accident and scared her off splash parks forever a while.

While Eleanor napped, Joel hunted houses and I holed up in the bathroom and trawled the internet for leads.

We went to, seriously, so many parks. Eleanor learned to go down the slide by herself

but had second thoughts.

Too late.

Our room got light super early, and she could see us from her pen, so she'd wake up at 5:30 and instead of rolling over and going back down she'd be like, Mama? Maaaaaama? Mamaaaaaaaa? Up up up up?So we'd ALL be up at 5:30, but only one of us would fall asleep later that morning on the way to the park.

This is the park by our new house. Eleanor approves.

This is the other park by our new house.

This is the dill given to me by a sweet old lady at the community gardens by the other park by our new house.

This is Eleanor on her way to sleep, and also back to Calgary.

Big people eat all the fruits.

We're working on eating like a big people because it's a lot easier for me when I can just be like, Here's a corn, and she's like, Ok.

We're learning about choosing your next bite. Like, where on this thing is still for eats?

Apples are tricky, because not only do you have to bite them hard

Like, real hard

But there's no clear stopping point. No PIT. Eleanor's goal with something like an apricot is not to eat it, but to get the pit out. The eating is incidental.

Grapes are also tricky, because they're stuck.

I mean, they're really on there.

What the heck.

Also, if you offer her a fruit, the first thing she'll say is 'Ewwww,' by which she means, 'That thing has a pit or a stem or a peel and we do not eat that part. I know that because I am big.'

She has conned me out of my own chair.

So the other day I'm on the couch reading, and she's across the room doing baby stuff, and then she's like, Cuddle? And I'm like, OF COURSE, because, I mean, come on.

And then she's like, Chair? And I'm all, Yeah, whatever, we can sit in the chair and cuddle.

And then she's like, Book? And I am like, Damn. I have been hoodwinked.

So because she's always conniving to get either me or Joel into the reading chair, a few days ago I set her up in the chair by herself and gave her a pile of books. The chair is right next to her shelf, so every few minutes she'd lean over and grab a new one.

And she sits and READS to herself for, like, half an hour.

And this is apparently how we do things now.

I really loved that chair.

We are going to miss this zoo so hard.

I was going to write a post about the Calgary zoo, and how, in our year here, Eleanor has gone from this lump of a baby who is all, Sure are a lot of people here, to an animal-loving fiend who talks about the zoo for days after we go, and who assumes that's where we're headed every time we get in the car.

But it's late, so here are a bunch of pictures of the back of Eleanor's head as she gets Really Close To Some Animals.

Hello, penguin!

Hello, bison!

Hello, wolf!

Hello, bear!

Hello, peacock! Peacock, you are too loud.

Hello, meerkat!

Hello, hippo!

Hello, monkey!

Hello, giraffe!

Oh zoo, you are too much.