Voice of Reason

Greg and I were drooling over some Nikon camera at Costco. It was so pretty, and amazing, and on sale.

Of course, it's not going to happen. The yearly bonus and tax return has already been earmarked for such projects as:
a.) the rest of our fence and
b.) a shed to put the lawn mower in.
But it's fun to dream.

Today, Greg and I were joking about buying the camera, talking about how we've always upgraded cameras right before the birth of each new baby, so it's practically a family tradition. I asked our three year old, "So Annie, do you think Mom & Dad should go out and spend $1300 on a new camera?"

She looked at me for a second and said, in a kinda sweet condescending voice, "Umm, do we need a new camera Mom?"

Good point.

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In other news Ellie's speech seems to be making some leaps forward, at the same time she continues to lazily regress.

The most amusing regression: She no longer calls my Mom "Amma." She's called her grandmothers "Amma" for a good 6-8 months now. But suddenly, just in the last two days, she's over it. Grandma can just be 'Na' like everyone and everything else. You see, Ellie uses the word 'Na' much like Smurfs used the word 'Smurf'; it can be a noun, verb, adjective, whatever. Pretty much anything she doesn't want to say (most everything) is just referred to as 'Na'. Cookies, the sun, trees, sidewalk, a glass of milk. At some point in the past, she's pronounced such aunt/uncle names as: David, Andrea, Talina, Star and Cody. But for the last month or two, they've all just been 'Na'. We joke about this, tease Aunt Star and Aunt Talina for being interchangeable Aunt Na's. But for her to go from saying "Amma" a good 10-20 times a day, to poor Grandma being relegated to just another 'Na' shows a new level of Ellie's speech laziness.

On the flip side, about this same time that she's decided to abandon one of her most commonly used words, she's all about using some new names. Annie's stuffed spider (which is a much cuter toy than it sounds like) is happily pronounced perfectly, "Lulu". Aunt Andrea's cat that Ellie saw for the first time in several months today was immediately identified by her name, "Gigi". Ellie's been throwing around these new words/names with reckless abandon. Maybe if Grandma would just change or name to something catchy . . .