moments

yesterday, i forget why, j. asked ella out of the blue "what are some things that daddy tells you not to do?" and ella thought about it and said "not to point at people." which was something he had told her in a restaurant a full week before.

i took elenora outside to play with chalks on thursday afternoon, and we saw some little bugs hopping about in the grass and ella looked at me earnestly and said "bugs are bad." i laughed out loud on that one, because of course we've never told ella that bugs are bad... she's just sort of made her own conclusions. i think maybe she was influenced by the time we were going to the beach but when we got there the greenheads (huge biting flies that attack you for 1-2 weeks of the summer at the ocean up here) were swarming around the car and i just drove us through the parking lot and out again saying "there are bad bugs here; let's go to russell orchard."

yesterday we were doing the clean up song and ella likes to throw out names of people who have to clean up, so she threw out the name "laurie" with a sly little look like "you didn't think i'd remember her, did you?" and i sang "laurie has to clean up! abbie has to clean up! elsa has to clean up!" then i asked her "ella, what is elsa?" and ella said "elsa's a dog." (and this is incredible because we haven't seen this dog but 3 times in her life--the last time being june or something when we took abbie out for ice cream.) so i asked ella "where did we go with abbie?" and she said "for ice cream."

elenora is rhyming all the time now. she'll get herself started and then just keep going. she'll say "coat, boat, toat, moat" and then change to "rhyming, miming, timing, giming" etc. or we'll go back and forth with it.

she did end up spending the night at her mam-aw's last night. j. and i went to dinner in newburyport and took a really late night walk around town. it's been so hot and muggy here. they keep saying we'll get some storms, but they've all traveled above or below us. it felt cool when we stepped outside for our walk last night, and then we realized that that was only the case because it was so hot inside.

one of momby and r.'s dogs died this past week. we had to explain it to elenora. i overheard her later that day saying to herself "other dog went to doggy heaven."