It is thankful thursday!

Jon reminded me as he walked out the door tonight to go BACK to work….I had better get the post up!  🙂

1.  I am thankful for Ava adjusting to her new sitter.  She had a lot to adjust to, a new nap schedule, new kids, new adult, no more mommy all the time, so all things considered she has been a trooper!

2.  I am thankful for a pretty good start to my school year.  It has gone fairly well, the kids are decent, and the new administration seems to be great.  Hope this trend continues all year!

3.  I am thankful that August is almost over, this means that the hottest part of summer is almost over.  Bring on the cooler temperatures!

4.  I am thankful that it is easy to look computer answers up!  Tonight when I was talking on Skype with my mom Ava hit the keyboard and suddenly my entire computer screen was rotated 90 degrees to the right.  Uhhhhh, I called Jon…an quick internet search told us how to fix it!  Whew!  Do you know how hard it is to navigate a sideways computer screen?  Even my mouse reoriented itself!  Nutso!

5.  Thankful for three great partners in my Math department.  There are three other teachers that are teaching the same/similar things as me.  Together we are going to get this ball rolling!  It has been great that we are each taking pieces of things that need to get done.  The load is much lighter than if we were doing it alone.

Thankful Thursdays

It is a thursday, THANKFULLY! 

1.  I am thankful for my friends and family.  I have had a moderately rough week at work this week (and it is our first one back, sigh!) and it is nice to have my family and friends to vent things to, talk them out, and feel better later as a result of them.  So, if I have vented/griped/cried to you this week, I am greatful for you!  🙂  (If I haven’t vented/griped or cried to you, I am thankful for you, too!  I will abuse you some other day)

2.  I am thankful for the people I work with.  I have a lot of great people surrounding me at school working through the issues together.  I am glad for that.

3.  I am thankful for Ava.  No matter how stinky a day goes, nothing makes it better than seeing Ava.  I swear, she is the best!

4.  I am thankful for my handy husband.  He gets mentioned a lot on here for his handywork, and Jonny is at it again.  This time it is our master bathroom.  Our master bath had some issues that needed fixing, so we are remodeling it.  I have to say, it looks amazing.  If it were not for the handy work of Jon (with a some help from friend Brent) this project would cost a LOT more than it does.  As I speak Jon is putting tile on the walls.  It is with a project like this I am totally made aware of lack of handy (wo)man skills. 

5.  I am thankful for former students moving on with life, contacting me later, and learning that they are productive citizens of our society!  I feel so accomplished to have kids come back and look me up almost 5 years later.   It is crazy to think the kids I had my first year teaching are getting married and having children of thier own.  Wowza!

15 months?

Yep, 15 months. 

I am not sure where the time has gone.  My summer is all but over, my “baby” is so much more toddler than baby it is insane, and we have 15 month stats to share with you.

She went to the doc today here is her current size update:

Head: 47 cm (75 percentile)  Do you remember when she had a tiny head?  Yeah, no so much anymore!  🙂

Height: 32 in (90th percentile) I guess we should expect no less, Jon is tall and I am not considered “short”.

Weight: 22 lbs (30th percentile)  Let me say that her light weight has not one single thing to do with her eating.  I have lots of proof that my child is a chow hound.   Lets start with her asking to eat, ALL.THE.TIME!  She eats breakfast, morning snack, big lunch, afteroon snack, dinner, evening snack.  18 ounces of milk goes down the hatch along with 10 ounces or so of water…all between sun up and sun down.  She is an eating machine.  Thus far we have never had eating issues with her, lets hope they keep up.  The doc did warn us that this is the time they start to become picky eaters. 

So, she is perfect.  Her vacabulary continues to amaze us.  The things she can do (like open the front door, YIKES) are awesome.  I can’t wait to see what 3 more months brings us!

Ummm

Ava will ask us when she wants something out of the fridge. This picture is from the other night when she climbed out of my arms to choose what she wanted. She was standing there saying “umm” until she decided on raisins.

Are you keeping track?

This post makes number 19.  Nineteen posts in not as many days.  We must be setting some sort of posting record here.  MAYBE we posted this many times in a row when we first had Ava, but she wasn’t moving, and she slept a lot, and she was a perfect statue to take pictures of.  Now, with the mobile, sassy, busy and messy Ava she is increasingly more difficult to snap pictures of. 

The pictures aren’t always perfect.  For example-  This next image is one I was taking of her while she was throwing a fit about me not giving her the throw pillow.  You know, the one I was leaning on.  The one she wanted to take off the couch and put on the floor for our poor dogs to lay on.  They are so mistreated that they have to sleep on the floor, she feels like they need something soft and squishy to lay thier sweet heads on.

What is this picture good for, other than to show you that she isn’t always smiley and sweet?  To show you how many teeth this monster has.  Holy moly, those are big teeth!

Caught in the act…

I was finally able to catch a video of Ava chatting with the dogs.  This is first thing in the morning, before they are out of thier cages.  When her feet hit the floor she runs to their cages.  What you see below is what happens next.  (note the  “wee wee”…..and the finger point accompanied with a “no”….sigh)

The dogs eventually gave up because I was not moving toward letting them out, but they are so excited to see her because they know cage times is over.

Our little garden gnome

As we have mentioned in previous posts, Ava loves to be outside.  When we go out usually she will run around and I will do something in the garden while watching her.  It usually consists of me picking the tops off the basil so it doesn’t go to flower.  She will occasionally come over and pull off the leaves of the basil, no big deal.  She is helping, right?  Well, one particular day I was on the phone with her Grandma D while we were outside.  She was “helping” me in the garden and I apparently wasn’t watching what she was helping with too closely.  The next thing I knew Ava was handing me my ENTIRE thyme plant, roots and all.  She just grabbed the stems and pulled.  The whole plant came up.  While it was coming up it spewed dirt ALL OVER her.  She had dirt in her hair, on her face and all down the front of her shirt.  I quickly grabbed the plant and put it back in the garden (my poor thyme!) and started to wipe the dirt away.  I wiped a lot of it off before I thought about snapping this picture.  She is red hot and sweaty, because it is miserable out side, but she hates coming in. 

I have to also add that this is Jon’s most favorite, favorite picture of her.

Motor mouth!

Ava has had a word explosion lately.  Since they ask how many words they have at her doctors appointment, which is next week, we thought we would make a list of our own.  It is really hard to come up with all of her words on the spot.  This is our starting list.  I am sure there are words that are not on here, but Jon and I collaborated on the list and this is what we have so far!

Words

1.  Dadda
2.  Momma
3.  wower—Flower
4.  doh doh—Dog
5.  wee wee—Whitley
6.  Ball
7.  wa wa—Water
8.  peas–Please
9.  tank or tank oo–Thank you
10.  nummy–Yummy
11.  baaa (and always in a whisper!)–Bath
12.  No
13.  Uh huh
14.  Uh uh
15.  Uh oh
16.  Wow
17.  shhhhhhz–Shoes
18.  Baby
19.  Bella
20.  Bee—blanket
21.  Up
22.  This
23. Read
24. Elmo (a big shocker to us!  She must have picked it up from the Elmo books!)
25. Beep Beep
26. Go
27. Toe toes

 

Signs

1.  Hat
2.  Dog
3.  Cat
4. Duck
5. Outside
6. Swing
7. Flower
8. All done
9. Please
10.  fan
11. Blows kisses
12. Tooth brush
13. Love
14. Bird
15. Milk

And, finally to be current…

My mom came to visit!  It is an annual tradition, she comes down for my birthday.  We go shopping, hang out, and just enjoy each other. 

Part of enjoying one anothers company apparently involves laundry.  Lets be honest, who’s life does not involve laundry?  Ava REALLY likes to push the buttons on the machines.  We have even found a stray toy, sippy, or other random object in the washing machine. 

Ava was also the source of many hours of entertainment.  Here she is pressing the buttons on her house to play music and “dancing” along.  Her dancing this day consisted of lots of wrist twisting and hand waving!

Ava loves to be outside and her Grandma J loved to take her out there.  My mom is a trooper and braved the crazy heat to play outside for HOURS with Ava!

Ava was very interested in Grandma J’s laptop.  Her background image is a picture of the three of us (Megan, Jon and Ava).  Ava would climb on the couch, point at the picture and either say “baby” or “dada”.  Usually it was the latter of the two.  Here she is pointing at the screen telling us who is there.

And….to wrap things up here….giving Grandma J a smooch! 

Not a morning person?

This is Ava first thing in the morning.  It looks like she needs to shake the sleep off but that is not the case.  She wakes up with energy to spread around! 

I need to shake the sleep off when she wakes up, but she is on FIRE!  She must see the dogs, NOW!  She runs to thier cages and waits for them to be let out.  She runs around like crazy.  I am still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes when she has run her energy down and is ready for her morning nap.