Merry Christmas!

(Sleeping off the excitement on Christmas day...)

Help! We're being overrun by presents! Ava's Nana, Uncle David, and Auntie Tara (TaTa) outdid themselves again this year. Ava has a ton of new presents. She loves her new toys and they are mostly learning toys so I guess they are ok. :)

She LOVES this rocking Mickey. She tries to rock on it by herself which is so cute. She can't get the back and forth momentum but she wiggles to try to go and it's so funny.

Nope, that's not a black eye, that's her make-up... haha!

This is what Ava's uncle's girlfriend, Bonny, got us. I LOVE this. It is perfect for getting the breastfeeding message out there and how cute is Ava in it?!

Nana's present. After I unpacked it Ava crawled over and pulled herself up to play with it. How fun!

A Jenny-Jump-Up from Uncle DayDay (David) and Bonny. We put this in the kitchen in front of the washer and dryer and put some magnet shape toys on the dryer. Ava really likes to push the magnets around and play with the shapes. It's nice for her to be in there with me when I'm cooking or Mike is doing the dishes. ;)

Let it Snow!

Wow, December is such a busy month. Ava is crawling and getting into way too many things! The other day she pulled a fairy house made of wood onto her head and gave herself a little scratch. It seems like she is always falling over and bumping her head on the floor, the tub, the table... etc. I'm glad babies are invincible! But she cries so badly when it happens I feel so bad.

Now she has a cold too. It is a pretty bad one. She can hardly breathe. At least she has figured out how to breathe through her mouth sometimes. It's when she sleeps and eats that it gets annoying. Last night she had a high temperature of 99.8 and I'm sure she didn't feel very good. She wouldn't let me put her down. We tried to give her a bath and she wasn't liking that so she cried until we got her jammies on and I nursed her to sleep. Once she finally got to sleep she whined a little bit until she fell into a deep sleep. My bladder was so full I couldn't lie with her anymore so I tried to put her down but that just upset her again. I had to hold her all night, poor thing. Her fever broke at around 3:00 in the morning. She seemed much happier today. I hate it when she is sick. Mike hates it when she smiles all sweetly when we know she doesn't feel good. It breaks his heart. Mine too.

She had a doctor's appointment scheduled for today to get her shots but I couldn't see doing that because if she had a reaction I wouldn't know if it was the shot or her cold. She weighed 20.9 lbs and was 27 1/2 inches long. She is still over the 95th percentile which makes us all feel great! Ava's first Christmas is coming up quickly and I still have a lot to do...

Busy Baby... Busy Days... Sleepy Nights

Seriously? It's been that long since I've posted?

Well, here is what has been going on in our little world...

Ava is so happy and healthy. She hit the 20 lb mark finally. We have both figured out how breastfeeding works. She is crawling and playing all the time. She gets one exciting (non-milk) meal a day including some of her favorite foods. Pears, avacados, bananas, and sweet potatoes top her list. She has been sleeping a little better the past week, skipping the 3:00 am feeding and sleeping right on 'til 5! Yay for mommy! :)

We spent Thanksgiving day with the Hilliards in Branson ending with dinner and a show at Dixie Stampede. We all had so much fun there. Ava slept through the first part of the show but then she watched the end and was so excited to see the horses running around. Below is one of the pictures Tara took of us while we were there. We came back home and on Saturday I made dinner and all the fixin's for everyone. That was a really fun day. We played games until midnight!



The other big thing that happened last week is that Ava turned 6 months old! It surprises me to think that this picture (below) was her 6 whole months ago. It feels like a lifetime in a moment. I was holding a little baby who was 3 months old and 10 lbs the other night and I could hardly remember Ava being so tiny.


Blast to the past right?

In other news... I am positive that Ava is an advanced baby. I may be biased because of course I think she is amazing, but she is ahead on all of her milestones. She is crawling now which is great as I read that big babies sometimes crawl later due to their chunkiness. Her crawling is still like army crawls but she does get up on all fours and rock back and forth and has taken a few tentative forward scoots using her hands but soon topples over because the back legs don't work when she wants them to. She is waving hi and bye bye and used to say "buh-buh" for bye bye but hasn't done it in a while. She has been saying "Da Da" for a few weeks now and associates it with daddy. If I say, "where's Da Da?" She looks around for him and says "Da Da, Da Da..." She also practices Da Da all day along with screaming bloody murder. She thinks it's funny to scream at the top of her lungs which delights people that call during the day.

The greatest of all things that she has done recently is that she signed milk to me yesterday. I was feeding her and she was kind of playing as she ate and so I signed "milk" and she held up her little hand and squeezed it. I praised her and called Mike in the room and asked her to do it again and she did it on cue. He then showed her the sign and asked her to do it and she did it for him too! I have never been so proud. Now I know how smart she is. I didn't expect her to mimic me or even to understand the signs until she was at least 7 months so this gives me great hope for what we can accomplish together.