Ella Bella

This time around I've realised what an enormous upheaval it has been for Ella to be packed up and moved to the other side of the world for a few weeks, and then brought home again, even if it is for the pleasurable experience of enjoying a holiday. When we brought her over to Australia for the first time she was only 9 weeks old, and all she did for the whole flight was sleep and feed! Since then it has been much the same, even if a certain amount of entertainment has been built into recent trips, but this time it was a different, and very dirsuptive, experience. She isn't a parcel any more, that we can just pick up and move at will. She's got routines, she has opinions, she feels wrenched away from one thing and dumped into another.

Travelling over to Europe with her was fine, if tiring on my own. On the way back Michael sat next to her on the plane and I had some peace and quiet. A certain amount of bribery went on: we'd seen how much she enjoyed playing with Mia Jacob's dressing up clothes, and when we were in London we went to Hamley's and bought Ella a beautiful 'princess' dress and some sparkly shoes. The deal was that if she was very good on the way back to Australia we'd 'see about' buying her a princess dress -she obviously didn't know that it was already in our luggage...

We got back on Saturday afternoon and had to try and stay awake for a few hours before crashing into bed. The dress proved a very useful tool in persuading Ella that she had to wake up and eat some dinner after she'd inadvertently fallen asleep on the sofa, and it's a measure of how exhausted she was that although she was able to eat something and look at the dress, she was too tired to try it on until Sunday morning!

Naturally I took some photos, and here they are. Note, please, that my decision to forego the pink frilly number in favour of a beautiful soft yellow paid off! She says that it reminds her of Belle's dress in the Disney animation of Beauty and the Beast