Videos Finally

2/27/10 - stomping & pups wrestling

2/27/10 - uh oh, snake, & sitting on Pancake

3/8/10 - animal sounds, body parts, "so big!"

3/8/10 - peekaboo, "so big!" & uh oh

Little Mirror

Ava is really starting to imitate me now. She is really like a little mirror. For example, when either of us have an "uh-oh" moment I often widen my eyes, cover my mouth, and gasp a little... Well she is doing that very same thing now. If she "drops" (aka throws) something off of her highchair she will gasp, cover her mouth with one tiny hand, and look at me with big wide eyes and say "uh-oh!" It's so amazing! And it is showing me quite clearly that she will learn how to react to almost every kind of situation FROM ME... talk about a huge resposibility!

In other news, we have reached another little milestone. For a couple months I have only been giving Ava her paci during naps and bedtime. Well for about the last week, she has been 100% paci-free! She gave it up so much easier than I had anticipated, too! I decided to try it one afternoon for a nap. I needed to take a shower and it was coming up on her usual nap time, so I just put her in her crib with a couple books to see what she'd do. (I pretty much expected her to read her books for a bit and then get fussy when she got tired of them.) Well when I got out of the shower I peeked in on her and she was just lying there (not asleep) kind of talking to herself. So as I got dressed and everything I kept an ear out for her and before I knew it she was asleep! So I tried it for the next nap, and then bedtime, and now here we are - she never even seemed to miss it. I guess she was just"ready" to give it up. And I had been dreading what I thought was going to be a battle to ban the paci!
Well I know I need to get some more videos on here.... I will try to capture some good stuff within the next week or so. :)

Thank You!

So like a day or two after my last post about all the things Ava is saying now, she started saying "thank you" a lot. I have been having her feed herself with her own little fork most of the time now but she can't stab the food yet. So I get the food on the fork and put the fork on her high chair tray. She picks it up, eats the food off the fork, and then hands the fork back to me. I always say thank you when she hands it back to me, and she apparently picked up on that. Now she says thank you when she hands the fork back to me... or when she hands a puzzle piece to me, or anything else, hehe. I will try to get it on video soon, maybe tonight. :)

Videos

1-24-2010

1-30-2010

Boo for Shots; Woohoo for Fun!

Well Ava had her one year appointment today. She is 28 inches long and weighs 18 lbs 14.25 oz. She is in the 10th percentile for height and weight and 75th percentile for head circumference. The doctor said she looks great in every way and is developing perfectly. She got three shots today and, of course, did not like that one bit! Hopefully she won't have any real noticeable side effects over the next couple days.
Ava is doing so many fun things now. She says hi, mama, dada, uh-oh. She waves hello and goodbye. She makes the animal sounds for tiger, dog, monkey, cow, and cat. She knows where her ears are ("Ava, where's your ear?" and she grabs it); currently working on the other parts. She knows what clapping is ("Ava, can you clap?" and she claps). She loves, LoVeS, LOVES reading books (and turning the pages, of course). She plays chase, hide and seek, and peek-a-boo. Oh yeah, she plays fetch too haha... Richard was throwing a tennis ball up the stairs for the pups and Ava got her ball out of the toy box and brought it to him. He threw it for her and she went and got it and brought it back to him... over and over. :) She loves stacking and knocking down blocks and loves looking for toys that we hide in things or under things. She likes to talk; I put her down for a nap about 15 minutes ago and I can still hear her up there talking to herself (and most likely playing with her socks that she has taken off). She loves to eat and is doing better with what she likes. For lunch today she had a piece of ham lunch meat, half a slice of whole wheat bread, some raw broccoli, a slice of apple, and water in her sippy cup.
I will try to put some more videos on here soon. They speak much more clearly about her than I do just writing. :)

One Year Old!!!

Ava's First Birthday Cake (before)


Ava is one year old today (12/22/09)... How can this be!?!? I know it sounds so cliche, but time really has flown by! We had a few people over for dinner tonight and I made an "Applesauce Healthy Cake" topped with some regular frosting for Ava to dig into. (She actually ate A LOT of it as you will see in the video below.) She is really turning into a little girl, not so much a baby anymore. Anyway, so what's going on with Lil A?... She LOVES reading; we can read 7-8 books in a row without her losing interest and she helps me turn the pages. (She is actually "reading" by herself next to me on the floor as I'm typing this, hehe.) We've been down to nursing just once a day for a few days now, and are about to move to every other day.Ava is walking pretty well now. I haven't seen her stand up without pulling up on something, but once she's up she takes off on her own. She is also "talking" a lot more. She definitely says "mama" and is constantly babbling other things. :) She is doing very well with understanding and obeying when we tell her "no." Sometimes she fusses a little when she gets a no, but she rarely pushes to get her way about whatever it is. She loves playing with blocks; the different shaped ones that go into the slots of the top of the container (the one from the "hide the paci" video in an older post), and some stacking and nesting blocks. She likes when I stack them so she can knock them down, and she likes when I help her put all the nesting ones back inside each other.
Anyway, there are a million little new things Ava does almost every day so I won't try to list them all... Here are some videos (everyone's favorite part of this blog, I'm sure). :)


12/19/09 - Walking & "Talking"

12/22/09 - Eating Cake (Part 1)

12/22/09 - Eating Cake (Part 2)

12/22/09 - Walking & Roaring :)

Ava's First Birthday Cake (after) :)

Walking!!!

Well it has obviously been quite a while since I updated this and a lot has happened in the life of our little bugga. Ava is 11 months old now! So what's been going on?... Well, we went to Georgia for the first two weeks of November. Saw family and whatnot, which was nice, but it was a tiring trip (ugh, the drive!) and we were glad to get back to our Kansas home. About two weeks ago, Ava had two new teeth emerge. The top left middle one and the one to the left next to it (not the other middle one!). It looks a little funny for now, but I'm sure the other middle one will come in any day. I will walk you through the other happenings using videos...

October 25 - Ava went through about a two week phase where she would sniff at us a lot. (That's the best way I think to describe it; the video shows what I mean.) She doesn't really do it anymore but it was funny while it lasted. :)

November 21 - Well it took a lot longer than I had expected (based on when she started pulling up and cruising along furniture), but Ava started standing on her own and taking a couple little steps as you see in this video. I used Cheerios and a lot of cheering and excitement to keep her interested in standing. :)

November 21 - The rocking dog in this video was mine when I was Ava's age... and she loves it as much Mom says I did. :) "Rock, rock!"

November 22 - Ava likes to play hide and seek with her paci. I put it at the bottom of this bucket and then put all the blocks on top of it. She pulls the blocks out one by one until she finds the paci. Then she holds it up - victory! She falls over at one point in this video and I get really tickled because she has been proficiently sitting up for months now and pretty much never falls over anymore. I guess it's comparable to an adult randomly falling down walking; pretty funny.

November 27 - In this video Ava takes more steps in a row. She usually dives for whoever she's walking to in the last few steps. :) She's gaining confidence in herself.

November 28 - Getting better and going further! She is starting to like the fact that she can do it all by herself.

Today, November 30, she is letting go of furniture on her own and walking without much enticing. She still knows that crawling is her fastest and most reliable way to go, but she's trying the walking a lot more. :)

I cannot believe she is almost a year old. Ava eats pretty much whatever we're eating at meal times. I just make sure it's small enough and soft enough and let her have at it. She has the mashing motion of chewing down pat so despite not having many teeth she can eat just fine. And she's a very good eater; a bottomless pit, really, hehe! We are down to nursing just twice a day now, morning and night. I plan to go down to once a day in a week or so and phase out completely probably by the end of December. We'll see how it goes... I called the hospital today to see about getting her 12 month check-up and shots but we have to wait until January based on the time I got her 6 month shots, so she gets to avoid that a little longer. That pretty much sums up the past month and a half, I think. We are just enjoying being a family of 3 (well, 5 including pups of course) and hope Richard won't have to go anywhere any time soon. :)