Halmoni and Harabuji

The in-laws are here until mid-February or so. Ellie is MUCH better this time. I think she's gotten warmer and kinder in general, and apparently all her memories of her grandparents are happy ones. Being bombarded with presents first thing helped, too. She is pretty happy they're here and was excited to play with them and show off her stuff. She really wanted to play with haRabuji (I was corrected in my English spelling of that word), but he couldn't really understand what she was saying. She kept offering him different toys, to which he'd reply, "oh yeah" or "mmm." Eventually, she just asked him, "What do YOU want to do?" To which, of course, he replied, "Oh yeah."

Anyway, last time they were here, Ellie was in the midst of her terrible twos. When they came last January, she was at the beginning of them, when my mother-in-law returned in April, she was in the latter part. I don't know what it was, but she just decided to be consistently super rude to her halmoni. Stressed us all out. Stressed me out that she was being so terrible, stressed halmoni out that Ellie didn't like her, stressed Ellie out that she was constantly getting in trouble... made for unpleasant days. Thank God she's over it.

We've kinda realized that Ellie is snobby to certain people; more specifically, people with whom she knows she can get away with it. People who indulge her, especially when she's being naughty, she is just consistently naughty with. However, people who make her follow the rules, obey them, and cooperate, she gets along with better. Is this a respect issue? The whole innate respect for authority thing? Weird. But lately, as mentioned, she's gotten better. She used to be snobby with my mom, and isn't so much anymore. She was kinda like that with Paul, too, but that got better his last visit as well.

Matthew is his normal friendly self. Like usual, he grinned from ear to ear (more like forehead to chin, in his case) when he first saw them. He's taken to them pretty well, as I expected. He got sick today, so he's kind of clingy to me. I'm sure he'll get over it, though. He got presents, too, but he doesn't differentiate between inanimate objects he eats that he already had vs. new ones that are given to him.

As for me, as most of my friends know, it's difficult for me to share my space. I think it'll be OK, though. They're pretty good about giving me my space, and they're pretty busy when they're here anyway. My big thing is not being able to pump in the living room while watching TV (since we don't have cable in our bedroom), having to be fully dressed at all times, and feeling guilty about watching TV or taking a nap or doing something else nonproductive in those few precious moments of both children sleeping.

I'm happy to say, though, that I'm enjoying their company and was looking forward to seeing them. Really, it's kind of sad that they only see their grandkids once a year for a few weeks. This is actually the first time Harabuji has seen Matthew at all. Weird. He's all crawling and doing tricks now.

Oh, and I showed my baby book to my mother-in-law. She was shocked to see how much Matthew resembled my infant pictures and how Ellie resembled my toddler pictures. I think I'd mentioned before that it slightly annoyed me when she would insist that Ellie was 100% Peter. There's something inherent in a mother that makes her want her children to resemble her. (That was a lot of hers in one sentence.) Now she insists that they both look exactly like me. So it was kind of petty, but still somewhat gratifying. Sheesh, I'm immature.