Hats and Bobo

Ava turned 19 months this past week. I cannot believe how big she is getting.  She amazes me everyday. I always look at the world around us to see how she learned something.
Lately she looks for anything to put on her head as a hat. She has been using buckets and our pasta strainer.

 She will fully cover her face with this bucket and walk around the house.
She thinks it is so funny. Yesterday she had this one on her head and then put tried to put the other one on top of it. We had to help her.

I am not sure if I have ever posted a picture of "bobo" up close.As of late, she has been biting on his left eye, so it looks like he has a black eye all the time. We are keeping an eye, no pun intended, on it because I don't want her to pull it out and choke on it. She gets a good grip on it and yanks at it.    I know that I will have to perform surgery on bobo at some time in it's life, so I better get ready.  She is becoming more independent and wanting things her way. It is always a new challenge, but we always find a way to compromise.

Ava and her fish

Ava has found a new toy, our wooden fish from our plant shelves in our house. We have a million of those plant shelves in our house that usually just collect dust, but when we moved in, we decided to buy a bunch of fish and ducks to sit there. Ava has recently noticed them and points to them daily to see them. Mike finally got some down and that is all she wants to do is play with them. Here she is the other morning playing with all her fish outside.

Eating... The challenge of a lifetime. Trying to come up with different ideas of what to make for Ava and then to make it a couple of times to see if she really likes it or not. The other night, Ava wouldn't eat her dinner, which is not unusual these days. She really doesn't like to sit still to eat. She likes to have snacks on the mat at our back door. She will pull me over there and sit down, which means, I am ready to eat something. So after letting her down from her chair, Mike and I continued to eat and she pulled a chair out from the table and got up on it (without her booster). We gave her her plate and she proceeded to eat the rest of her meal. If I have to do it that way every time, I will. Eating at this age just isn't important. I stopped giving her crackers all day long and if she is hungry and fussing for something while I am cooking, I give her bites of her veggie or fruit. I don't want her to live off of crackers and water. She needs something to stick. I also try to get hummus and cheese to her as a snack, so that the fruit/veggie don't go right through her. Don't get me wrong, I still give her some crackers, but it is just not all day. We have been trying to buy organic foods for her. All her snacks are organic with the occasional goldfish or cereal. We are going to try organic hot dogs next because that seems to be the one things she will eat more often than others. What a challenge it is!!!!!

Anyway, here is her eating like a big girl...

This is a picture after her bath. She is getting so big!!!! She will be 19 months old next week.

She is starting to mimic things we do. The other night, I was taking my vitamin and I put it in my mouth and tilted my head back for it to go down, which I had to do twice and I look over at her and she is tilting her head back too! I had a scratch on my chin and I look over at her and she is scratching her chin too.

I think we are getting closer to potty training. Like I said before, it is more me dreading it than her. Whenever she takes a poo-poo, I can usually tell, because she starts to walk funny. If I ask her if she took a poo-poo, sometime she will say yes, sometimes no, but if I say do you want to flush your poo-poo down the toilet,she says yes and runs to her bedroom to get changed. Then she has to look at it immediately. After she is all cleaned up, we take it to the toilet and plop it in and then she flushes it down and waves good-bye. She will also tug at her diaper when she pees. I know these are all the signs that she is getting ready. We have been reading potty books too. I am going to start in late October after we get through the next couple of weekends that have things going on. We will see how it goes.

21 weeks down, too many to go

I realized I haven't posted a picture in a while. Here is me at 21 weeks. I feel like I am at least 8 months pregnant these days and Mike keeps reminding me that I have a long way to go. Yikes! The "9" on this shirt represents that I will be pregnant for 9 months. I have had so many people ask me what that meant. One lady thought that it meant I was in my 9th month. Do I really look that big?, I thought. As I have said before, this pregnancy seems to be dragging on forever. I guess part of it is that I am chasing Ava around and am realizing how tiring it is to do so.

For the most part, I feel really good. I have been able to get out on Thursday and Friday mornings to go for a walk and then to the park with Ava as it has cooled down more in the mornings. Actually last week, I had to put a sweater on, it was quite chilly (62 degrees). It is soooo nice and I can't wait for permanent cooler temps. Noah is active and kicking all the time now. Mike has been able to feel him move around too, which he loves. My back has been hurting along with my hips at night. That is what is making it seem like a long pregnancy. I still have 4 months to go... Let's hope the daily heartburn holds out a bit longer.

Ava's New things

What a nice weekend, but boy do they fly by. On Saturday, I went wedding dress shopping with my sister, Jaclyn. She found her dress and we all had a good time. I am in the wedding and had to pick out a bridesmaids dress. Now, since the wedding is in April, it will be cutting it too close to pick out a dress after the baby is born, so I sucked it up and tried on 2 dresses that I think will compliment my post baby body. I wish we would have taken pictures. It was quite comical to try on dresses 5 1/2 months pregnant. They don't have mirrors in the dressing room, so I was forced to come out to see what it looked like and show the entire world. I figure I will be a bit skinnier when I actually have to wear the dress. Once Jaclyn finalizes the color I am going to buy it and then I will have it to try on every month after the baby is here to make sure it fits. The lady at the dress shop said to get one size up from my pre baby size, so that is what I will do.

Sunday was a hang out at home day. I was feeling good in the morning, but the weekend caught up to me after lunch and I was down for the count. I pretty much stayed in bed and on the couch as I felt worn out and soooo tired. I guess I have over done it lately. Mike will be traveling this week. He has an overnight trip to Kansas City, so I utilized his help and rested as I will be doing it alone for 2 days.


It always seems like Ava learns something new so fast and before I know it, I can't remember her not being able to do it. She has really enjoyed coloring or scribbling with a pen and paper. My mom was down here this weekend and bought Ava an activity table. She loves it. She likes all the nooks and crannies on it.

She has started wanting to wear our socks and put on my flip flops. I don't have a picture of her with my flip flop on, but I managed to get a picture of her with my socks on. She tries to do it herself and after much frustration, she comes to me to put them on.

She is loving puzzles at the moment and getting really good at them. We brought them into our bedroom last night and she was putting them together.

I bought her "big" girl pj's that we put on last night. Right now she just sleeps in a long sleeve onsie and her sleepsack. She is starting to grow out of them and they don't really make onsies in size 2T, so we graduated to a 2 piece pj set. We had just been putting her in the top and a diaper, but last night we tried out the pants. They were a bit long, but we could tell she was so proud to be in big girl pj's.

So pretty..... that is what I think when I see this picture. She has been letting me put a barret/bobby pin in her hair lately. She still doesn't keep it in long, but some days she will forget about it. The other day, she was playing outside and got hot and sweaty and because her bangs are long, she let me put a bobby pin in. I think it cooled her off. Here is a picture from the other night. I wish she would wear them all the time as her hair is out of control.

Our fun Labor Day weekend

On Friday, I officially made it to the 1/2 way point in this pregnancy. Well, it is more than 1/2 way because I can schedule my c-section at 39 weeks and I will do just that. I will be done as soon as they say so, unless he decides to come early. I have been feeling really good.I have a lot of energy, which is a good thing and a bad thing. I want to do so much more, but then get really tired from over doing it. Oh well, I will never learn. Since I have it, I am going to take advantage of it. This weekend I went out shopping and helped the economy out. I was in desperate need of clothes. I just couldn't take all my shirts being too tight and starting to get too short as my belly is growing at a fast rate. I found some great clearance items at the Gap and a couple of things at Motherhood Maternity and a pair of leggings and a top at Sears (of all places). There are not many places to go around here, so the pickins' are slim.
On Sunday, my mom and Dwayne came down to hang out with Ava and Mike and I went shopping for new clothes for him. He needed new work slacks like it was no body's business. I have been hounding him to get some, but he was being cheap and would never go. Finally, I think he got sick of them and we decided to head out. It is hard for him to find his size because they just don't make a lot of 34 lengths out there or if they do, they are the first ones sold. Anyways, we started at Macy's and thought we would just "try" it. We ended up with 4 pairs of slacks, a button down shirt, a pair of black shoes and some socks. Then I had to have lunch and we went back to Macy's and found him a pair of shorts and a t-shirt for weekend wear. I bet everyone is sick of his orange Cancun shirt that he wears EVERY weekend. At that point, I was so tired we had to go.

Saturday afternoon we went over to my sister Jacy's for some food and college football on the side. Ava had a blast playing with her cousin Sophie. I think Sophie enjoyed it too until she realized that she couldn't really tell Ava what to do as Ava doesn't really understand it. Ava also isn't very good at sharing and if she wants something, she will go for it. In another year, those 2 will be best buds.

As I mentioned earlier, on Sunday, my mom came down to visit and she bought Ava a little bike for her to ride. She doesn't really ride it, she just likes to turn the key, open the seat and put something in it and pull it back out and just sit on it. Here she is on it...(The one on the right is when I asked her to smile!)


She is having a blast all the time, exploring everything. She loves to play on our bed in our bedroom. I think because it is so big, she can just onto the pillows. She also loves to open the door on the console table in there and hide herself or bunny in there.

She likes to pull Mike's books out too and look at the covers. She is adding so many more words to her vocabulary and it is cute to hear. She will try to say a lot of words if you ask her to. My favorite is still woooow. She elongates the wow. She gets that from me because I always say it. She also says no, which is more like naaooo. It is usually in relation to me asking if she has a poo-poo. I have started to think about potty training and know that once I start, there is no going back, so I really need to do some more reading on techniques. I have gone back to my baby whisperer and have found some good tips to get started, but I have to be ready for the long haul. At first, I wasn't sure Ava was ready because she wasn't really showing any of the signs that they say to start looking for until about last week. In fact about a week and a half ago, she was standing in the kitchen obviously pooping and I said, are you taking a poo-poo and she looked me in the eye, grunted and shook her head "no". geez... But now, if I ask, she is starting to say yes with a wet and dirty diaper, so maybe we are on to something. The other thing that I would have to do would be to take away her water and give it to her during certain times of the day so I can sort of anticipate when she would need to go. At her age, it is about 40 mins after having some liquids. We have the potty, I just need to pick and date and go with it. Wouldn't it be nice to have her out of diapers before the second one is here!! She has started coloring and has some great masterpieces out there. I will have to take a picture and post. She is good at holding the crayons. She has regular crayons and the big bulb first time coloring crayons.

The next picture we just couldn't resist. Ava is famous for her hair and this is what it looked like yesterday morning...

Mike said she had wings!!

oh boy oh boy

We have decided on a name for our baby boy. His name will be Noah Adam Leptuch. Noah is a name that we both had liked when we were thinking of names before we found out we were having Ava. It was something we could both agree upon. So, when we were thinking of boy and girl names before we found out what we were having, it was on the short list. We each got one veto name and I had to use mine when Mike got stuck on Dieder. Yes, Dieder. I can just hear it now. (Noah, you will thank me later in life when you hear this story). I told some of our friends one night out that Mike was stuck on that name, knowing that the jokes would start immediately and hopefully help sway Mike away from it. Dieder, being a German name, they came up with Dieder Van Leptuch. Anyways, Noah it is!

It didn't take long for me to start the shopping. I sort of had an idea in my head on what colors I wanted to do for his room. I am going to make it difficult for my mom, sorry:( Because I found out the hard way with Ava that you can't use half the stuff in the bedding sets, I decided to just find paint colors that I liked and find crib sheets to match or accent it. I am going to do a tan color on 3 walls and then on the wall that the crib will be against, I am going to do a dark/light blue section on the bottom 1/2 with a dark brown stripe and then the other blue (dark or light) on the top 1/2. Turns out that there is a bedding set that has those colors in it, so I bought the crib sheet and I am waiting for coupons to buy the mobile and the 2 canvas wall art pieces. It just so happens that they colors match almost perfectly. It is the Cocalo Jackson bedding. Below, I tried to get the best shot of the sheet and paint samples, but the pictures don't really show what color the paint samples are, so I will explain after the pics...


The top blue color is similar to the dark blue on the elephant. The light blue is similar to the light blue on the elephant. The tan that will be the main color is the same as the light tan on the sheet and the dark brown is similar to the dark brown on the sheet. You can google the bedding to see the art and mobile if you get bored!

I thought that I would have a hard time finding boy clothes, because they just aren't as "cute" as girl clothes, but I did not. I did a bunch of sale/clearance shopping. I was in Carter's and they had $3.99/$5.99/$7.99 clearance items with an additional 20% off of that,plus I had an additional 20% off my purchase. I stocked up. I went to Kohl's this weekend during their Labor Day Power Hours sale and bought some pj's as well. I would have to say, he is doing pretty well up to 9 months. That is as far out as I am going to get. If he is anything like Ava, he will be in 0-3 months for about a month or two and then more right to 3 months. Ava was 3 months ahead of her age, so I planned the same for Noah. For the most part, living in AZ, you can buy short sleeve shirts/onesies and be ok because it is hot/nice most of the year. I can just buy pants or shorts depending on how hot or cold it is. Here are a couple of shots of his clothes.


The drawer is full of 3 months and 6 months clothes. The pile on the front left has about 20 onsies. I did manage to find some good Carter's stuff at Ross and TJ Maxx. I won't buy anything Carter's unless it is at least 50% off and at Ross, it was more than that, so I stocked up.

My mom also bought him some clothes too! He will be just as spoiled as Ava.