Where do I begin?

It's seems like I have a lot to report today and I'm not sure where to begin, so if this post is rambling and not very well organized. That's why. :-)

Let's see, first, we got somewhere between 12-18 inches of snow over the weekend. All Thursday and Friday, I kept hearing people talk about the storm heading our way. But since I never have time to watch the news or our television is programmed to mindless kids shows, I never hear about these things. Everyone was like, "You ready for the snow?" Well, first how does one ready themselves for the snow? I guess some people go to the store and stock up. We didn't really do anything special. In fact, we drove an hour north on Saturday to visit my cousin Cindy and her family who just welcomed a new baby boy, Braeden Carl Roseland! He is a super cutie pie! And it was fun to get to see someone's baby so new, we've always been far away from everyone. I didn't meet their daughter until she was 8 or 9 months old. So it was a real treat to go see them when he was two days old. Congrats Roselands!

We tuned into the Oscar telecast last night along with nearly 40 million other people. I thought Ellen did a nice job and was pretty amsuing. And most of the dresses were nice. I hated Kirsten Dunst's and wasn't real fond of Anne Hathaway or Gwyneth Paltrow's. But many of the rest were quite stunning. Andrew and I did our annual Oscar ballot. Unforutately (for me), he won this year. I think I have pretty much won every other year, so this is quite a blow to my ego. ;-) Interestingly enough, we picked the exact same picks in every category except Costume and Best Picture. He picked correctly in both of those. We enjoyed all the hoopla about An Inconvenient Truth. They interviewed Al Gore on the red carpet and there were several things during the telecast that were about being "green". We were happily surprised when Melissa Etheridge won for Best Song. That was a big upset over the Dreamgirls songs! So anyway, Andrew can now put that he has worked on an Oscar winning movie on his resume! He was like a little kid all night so excited to watch the show.

In other news, the girls are doing fine. Lily is Lily, not much to report with her. She is 17 months old and basically does everything Ella does. We got her off the bottle last week. She was a little upset with us, but seems to have gotten over it now. She's saying alot. She's slightly misproportionate where she's wearing 2-3T shirts but only 18months pants! Long torso, short stubby legs. She's adorable and so sweet. Very animated with scowls, smiles, and silly faces.

Ella is doing great. She loves her once a week playdates with Ari and Jody. She always asks me when we're going to see Ari again. Our trip to the zoo two weeks ago was very fun. They have two indoor wings (the Tropics and the Ocean) and Ella loved all of it. We got to see a dolphin show and both Ella and Lily sat there for the whole 45 minutes completely intrigued and loved every minute of it. Last week, we ventured back to Adventure Peak at Edinborough Park. This week we're having Ari and Jody over for a playdate at our house. Ella's already looking forward to it tomorrow.

We also finally brought Ella to be evaluated by a speech therapist. We've always been concerned about her lack of talking, but it really pushed me when I noticed she was making up her own sign language more than adding verbal words to her vocabulary. The speech therapist told us that Ella has 23 of the 25 characteristics of verbal apraxia. This just means that there's a disconnect in her brain between knowing what she wants to say and getting it to come out of her mouth correctly. She understands everything she hears, she knows how to respond to it, and what it is supposed to sound like, she just doesn't possess the motor planning skills to get her words to come out. So she'll be going to speech therapy twice a week for one-on-one help and she should be talking much better in 6 months to a year. And hopefully completely normally by the time she starts kindergarten. We're very happy that we know what it is and that it is treatable. She'll be so excited and happy when she can actually say things she's trying to say!

So that's about it for today I think. Hope you all have a great week! I will try to get the Super Bowl and other new pictures uploaded this week. :-)