Ellie was THRILLED – she’s never seen snow, and I had been planning on a trip to the mountains for skiing this winter (a surprise broken big toe might screw up those plans…). Sometime Tuesday afternoon, Ellie asked me to grab the camera and take pictures of her in the snow. We didn’t have enough snow to make snowballs, snowmen, or snow angels… but she caught a few flakes on her tongue and danced in it like Winona Ryder in Edward Scissorhands. Cool kid.

Here are a few shots from Ellie in the blizzard…

Today, she’s just enjoying a day off of school.

Happy Halloween!

ICE CREAM!!!!!

Ellie flirted her way into a pineapple-coconut-something-something sherbet, and she picked out a scoop of pistachio for me. After all these weeks of nonstop travel, shooting, and editing… it was pretty cool to hang out at Baskin Robbins with the bean, talking about how tall grandpa is and how he’s probably at least twenty-one years old. Good times.

I hope we can do this again sometime soon… the beaches in Wisconsin just aren’t the same!

Last Christmas, she made an “Ugly Sock Monster” for Ellie. She called him Syd, and sent him home with me when I went up to visit her last December. Here he is in all his ugly glory, at a diner in downtown Richmond, with terribly unflattering on-camera flash on a point & shoot.

Ellie opened the package that Syd was in, and she tossed him aside. She just didn’t really dig him. I saved him from being tossed out with all the wrapping paper and bows, and put him on the top of her shelf as decoration, thinking maybe someday she’d notice him and want to know where he came from.

Almost a year went by. Every so often I’d catch a glimpse of Syd on her shelf, but he never moved, never got played with. He was lonely. Ellie can be merciless.

Then one night, we were heading off to bed, and she says “WAIT! I gotta have Chookie!” She runs up to her room and comes back – with SYD. I was floored! That night, she fell asleep with Duckie in one hand, and Chookie (Syd) in the other.

The next day, she carried him around with her all day long. She told me that his full name was Deer Coppola Beer Chocolatito, “but you can call him Chookie.”

That night, I managed to get a picture of her sleeping with Chookie. Awwwwww.

Which I find uncontrollably cute. I even write “dolphins” on my grocery lists.

But this morning, as I grabbed her “eat fast” breakfast on our way out the door to preschool, I started wondering what her teachers would think, since I’m not there to translate.

“What did you have for breakfast, Ellie?”
“Bananas and dolphins.”
“…”