Ella's new smile

Today was the day when Ella's abscessed tooth met the dentist and her tools. As you can see, the dentist won. This is how it all unfolded...

Rewind about 2 years - Ella tripped and fell on a hard floor and managed to chip her tooth severely enough to warrant a trip to the Children's Hospital dental clinic. The end result? A strip crown on her tooth. At that point, we felt fortunate that the tooth was able to be saved. Once Ella recovered from that procedure her mouth happily talked (and talked and talked...) on, all the way up until March '09. At her regular dental check up we discovered that the tooth with the strip crown was in fact abscessed and needed to come out...which bring us to today (yes, it actually took 2 months for us to get an appointment, which is better than the 4 months out it was originally scheduled for).

The dental clinic had moved since our last visit (they built a new Children's Hospital - the small part we saw was very nice) so I allowed extra time to reach our destination. After various check-ins and toy gazing, we made our way to the appointment. Ella underwent a conscious sedation and then they began the procedure (typical stuff involving novocaine) - it didn't take very long at all but it was all very hard to watch your 3 year old undergo painful things for her benefit. Unfortunately Bill wasn't able to take the time off work to take her so I managed the best I could not to lose it while there - although I didn't fall apart completely I did manage to cry along with Ella at several points. But the end result was a tooth was pulled and an abscess went away; it looks like Ella is recovering just fine. She's on a soft diet for the next day or two so lots of chocolate pudding and ice cream, along with lots of movie watching today. She's looks pretty happy right now...

And where was Jack when all of this occurred? With one of his favorites, Iva Mae. When I picked him up it was obvious he had enjoyed his morning - he was covered in dirt and chocolate from M&M's :)

I'm very thankful the procedure is done and we are home and resting now! The tooth fairy will be visiting tonight...I'm trying to figure out how much inflation will be costing the tooth fairy this evening...

Ella dancing to Greek music

Ella just couldn't stop dancing to the music at the Greek food festival we attended last week.

Another trip to Lancaster

This trip to Lancaster was necessitated by an A/C repair in the van. We were sure glad to have an excuse to visit all the grandparents again.

Thursday - this was my first attempt driving solo with the kids. Other than it taking 6hrs, the kids did well. I'm sure it didn't hurt that we stopped 4 times :) We spent the remainder of Thursday at Nana and Pop's. The kids can never get enough of the dogs and cats there.

Friday - we took a trip to Hands on House (a children's museum) with the kids. The kids loved it - it was much more "farm" oriented than the children's museum in Pittsburgh so I enjoyed getting photos of the kids picking corn. We ended the day by playing over at Nana and Pop's. And or course I had the kids in bed in time to watch the Pens win the Stanley Cup :)

Saturday - we took a quick trip to the farmer's market in Lititz and then after a nap for Jack we picked up Bill at the train station. It was great to have him join us since we've missed a bunch of weekends together lately. We then headed over to a family reunion and the kids had a blast - Jack enjoyed playing in the buckets of water (set up for various games) and Ella really enjoyed fishing with Bill. After the reunion we headed back to Grammy's for the Aunt's visit. Jack successfully said Aunt Nancy and Aunt Ethyl's names and was quite proud of himself.

Sunday - we said our goodbyes to Grammy and Pap and visited Nana and Pop for a bit before heading out. Somehow with Bill along we managed to only make one stop on the way back...

A few kid snippets:
-while selecting the pictures for the blog slide show, Ella said "cool pictures Mom"
-Jack is giving me glimpses of the terrible twos...he has a terrible little temper.
-we watched Toy Story with Ella last night; she was able to follow along very well (we could tell by the questions she was asking)
-Jack is destroying a tissue box as I type

...and on that note the short list will have to do for now! Enjoy the pictures.

Ella and the bathroom towel

Instead of throwing the towel in a clump on the floor, Ella prefers to fold it after washing up.

Hanging out

Check out this link

Can you find me in photo #18?

Two fun filled days

We took the kids to the Children's Museum on Saturday to check out the Bob the Builder exhibit. They loved it - I had a hard time getting them away from the "water pump" (blue plastic balls going up a pipe). Bill met us around lunchtime when he got off work and I was grateful - it was my first solo trip to the museum and even though the kids were well behaved I was exhausted taking care of them after an hour and a half! Since the weather was nice we had a chance to explore the outside grounds of the museum. The biggest excitement was the sandbox/pit - Ella was hard at work putting sand in a bucket and Jack loved digging with all of the over sized shovels.


Today we took a tour of PNC park. (I guess I should clarify - we're talking baseball for all my non-sporting readers) It was a really neat tour and the kids did a great job considering it lasted almost 2 hours. We checked out all the different views of the stadium - club seats, special suites and the press box. The kids favorite part of the tour was the dugout and field. We couldn't go on the grass but that didn't bother Jack - he plopped himself right down in the dirt and started playing. Ella thought the playing field was cool and loved getting her picture taken in the dugout. I would recommend this tour to all ages; it's also very handicap/stroller friendly...and it was inexpensive and they run tours 2 or 3 times a day during the week and 1 Saturday a month.

It has definitely been a fun couple of days - but I sure am tired!