Ava loves her babydoll

I caught Ava hugging her baby close and giving her kisses. I just don't know where she learns these things, it can't be from the millions of hugs and kisses showered her daily by everyone she meets. She's growing up so fast and doing so many grownup things! She loves to give kisses and we'll often catch her giving them to her little bunny or baby doll. Standing all by herself is something she works on daily and now has started taking a few steps at a time. What happened to our baby who didn't even roll over? Now we have to be so careful if she's on our bed because she doesn't understand that going head first over the side might not be a great idea. Yesterday we were at my sister Ellen's and Ava thought the stairs were awesome and could climb them in a flash! But once up, getting down was another thing entirely. She's fullspeed ahead and has no brakes, this girl.

And today, the lid.

Yesterday I showed you Ava playing with the bottom half of her toybox, today she's taken to the lid. I guess its sort of slippery because she likes to sit on it and swivel round and round. Plus it makes a good "thunk" noise when she pounds on it, if its flipped over the other way. When she first "discovered" the lid a month ago we could set her in it and she'd stay there for the longest time, I guess the two inch lip was a bit daunting to cross. Like her hair? It can go in a pony but because its so straight it almost looks like a little antennae. Our friend Julie called it her "Bam-Bam Hair".

A toy box and so much more!

Ava discovered that not only will her toybox hold her toys but it will also hold her! She has started pulling everything out and climbing right in. The lid is also a great toy that she'll climb onto and just sit in and play with it forever. In this picture she was sitting in the box and Jeff decided to pile all of her toys in onto her lap, no objections from our baby. Bring on the toys!

Oops! I meant to post this yesterday! The posts that went up today are out of order, sorry, folks! :)

Wait! Don't you need my help?

What ya working on, Mom? You need my help? I'm real good with computers!

Ava's First Sleepover

Two of Ava's cousin's stayed at our house overnight last week. Unfortunately, it was because our niece Bailey was in the hospital due to an infection complication from her December appendectomy. Bailey is better now and she's very, VERY happy to be out of the hospital. (We love you, Bailey!) Ava loves having company especially when it is in the form of other short people like herself. She watches and watches as the boys just run circles around her and play with all of her toys. Her cousin Peter is always trying to "protect" her from what he perceives as "dangers" in her environment and, for the most part, she doesn't seem to mind being tackled and constantly pulled in different directions. I don't have a very good picture of them playing but here's one that I did get.

Where do we begin??

It seems like so long ago since we last posted a note for ya'll! Ava's doing so much I don't know where to start to catch you up! She's extremely busy, as all nearly-toddling toddlers are, I'm sure. Tonight Jeff kept laughing at her and saying, "She's so busy!" This evening she kept moving (dancing? wiggling? jumping?) from toy to toy to piano to box to toy to shoe to sock to foot to OUCH!! She bit me!! (She thinks our toes and limbs are fair game, we object but sometimes are caught offguard.) Ava's quite the piano player and kept the music going on her toy grand piano while managing to play with all the toys around her. It seemed that her goal was to let us know that she was having so much fun and keeping so busy playing that she didn't need to sleep. But by 9:15 her movements had slowed enough that we decided to make our move and tuck her in with a bottle next to daddy on the couch. With half an ounce down and 7.5 to go, she was out like a light. :) Sleep tight, tomorrow's another busy day.

No Posts Yet

Sorry about the major lag in posts, folks. It's not for Ava's lack of trying to be super dooper adorable so I'll take her picture and write about her, that's for sure. We had some crazy fun holidays and now when things started settling down, our computer crashed. Crashed and died, dead, dead, DEAD. Lucky for us, we have a super dooper friend who is super dooper computer smart and he's positive he'll have us up and running again soon. Until then, we're sorry! Please check back with us next week.

Of course I can't write something on the blog without telling you about Ava's latest antics. She's playing lots of peek-a-boo, blowing kisses and even trying to jump up and down. Her hair's really getting long so we gave her the tiniest first haircut ever, just enough so the hair wasn't hanging directly in her eyes. She's was cool with that.