Smallish

She's little. She's the youngest. In my mind those two things seem to be preventing my brain from comprehending that she's grown into a toddler. A toddler who is constantly watching and learning from what's going on around her.

This image is a great example.

The light was pretty in our family room on Tuesday morning, almost as if the sun were celebrating the start of school with us. Ellie's wispy yellow hair was glowing. A yellow-headed child coming from me is still something that I'm thoroughly enamored with and so I had to snap a picture of her. I wanted the image to be more eye-level, so I squatted down. She promptly did the same. So I stood up and said, "Ellie, stand up tall for mama." When she did, I squatted back down to snap my picture. She promptly squatted back down.

This little exchange repeated and I realized I'd never get her to stand up into that pretty sunlight. She was too busy doing as I did, not paying attention to what I was saying. Whoa. She's paying such close attention to us all... watching... learning... repeating.

My next conversation was with Monte about how we have to be more careful about what we say and do around this little sponge. It was very reminiscent of the moment we discovered that Gavin could decipher what we were S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G to each other. We had to either learn a new code or save some conversations for after our little super-speller was in bed.

Miss Ellie, may be smallish, but she's certainly no baby any longer. She's also forcing us to be even more mindful that our actions speak louder than our words. Luckily, I don't think she can spell Y-E-T.