almost 2

Elenora is in this phase where she will say "no" to things. And if it's something like "do you want mommy to help hold that?" and she says "no!" I try to respect that and just remind her "say 'no thank you'". But if it's something where I really need her to comply, I'll remind her to say "no thank you" and then I explain that I really mean that she has to go along with me. It's working pretty good.

She's really good about delayed gratification. Like, if I put her down and she starts to fuss and says "mommy pick you up" and I say "I'm going to do such-and-such and then I will pick you up." She's cool with that. We were outside yesterday and she wanted her trike, so I took her toys out of her hands so I could carry her upstairs with me to get the trike. She started fussing that I had taken the toys so I said "Ella, listen to me. We're going to leave these outside and go get your trike, and then we'll come back outside and you can play with them again." She calmed right down. It's nice that she can understand sequence of events and that I can kind of reason with her.

I finished the Hardy book. It was really good. Now I'm reading "Cancer Ward" by Soltzinitzin. My mom suggested it since I like thick Russian literature. I'm not very far into it. So far so good.