Nancy's wedding pictures

As I promised before, here are some pictures from Mike's sisters wedding that we went to in July. I just got these yesterday evening.

The bride and groom

Ava, daddy, mama and grandma Heidenfelder (Mike's Mom's mom)

All of us again.

My little miss sunshine. This is the only picture that I have of her in her dress:(

A day in the life of Ava

Yesterday was a pretty eventful day in the life of a 18 month old who is teething and in her "terrible twos". I was talking to Mike the last night and said to sum up the past 2 weeks I would have to say "handful", because that is what Ava has been. As I have mentioned before, I think there are many reasons, one being her teeth. Yesterday she was in rare form and would just whine and cry. Here is a picture of her and daddy reading and as you can see, she is chewing her thumb. (No, she is not sucking it). Some of it is that I don't let her have her pacifier at all during waking times, so I know that is what she wants and it does quiet her, but I have to be strong.

Last night, I tried putting a rubber band in her hair and it is so cute. I wish she would leave it in for longer than 30 minutes.

See, she also found that she can chew on daddy's short string.

She has also found it fun to get into the drawer in the kitchen where we keep our cutting boards. She likes to put them on the floor and walk on them..

****

I got to spend sometime out yesterday helping a friend that is pregnant register at Babies'r'us. It was a lot of fun. I had help from my sister in law when I registered and I could not have done it without her, it is so overwhelming for new moms. I don't know why they don't have more help for that sort of thing there. It would be helpful for first time moms. I, myself will register, even if I don't have a 2nd shower just because you get a discount on items on your registry 2 weeks before the baby is born and then after the baby is born. I am all about the discount.

There will be some things that we will need anyway and depending on if it is a boy, we will need more stuff. I just can't put a boy in girls clothes, but he can use some pink burp clothes.

A year and a half old

What happened? Today, Ava is 1 1/2 years old. In 6 months, she will be 2 with a brother or sister around. Crazy. Time sure does fly. She keeps us busy.

This past week has been a little rough. I know that she HAS to be getting her 2nd set of molars.She has been chewing on her finger as if they are candy. She also spiked a low grade fever on Thursday. It was about 100.6 all day long with Tylenol every 4 hours. The last and worst sign, is that she has some sleepless nights. All signs point to teeth. Last night was the worst. She woke up at midnight, 2:30, 3:30 ( and was up crying on and off for an hour), then decided to wake up at 5:22am! The day before, Friday, she took a 45 minute nap too. I am only hoping that tonight is a better night sleep. It is exhausting. I did some research online only to find that many kids around 18 months old start having sleep issues. She is also getting ready for many more words to come, so developmentally she is getting ready to advance, which has been known to cause sleep issues. At least this is what I keep telling myself when I am wide awake at 3:30am praying for her to fall asleep or not wake up.

She has added some new words to her vocabulary. She says "zoo", "wow", "mmm-hmmm" (for yes), "na" (for no), "da" for dada and "ma" for mama and many more. She will try to repeat your words if they are not too hard. She learned how to blow kisses too, which is cute.

She is a good helper and listener. The other day, she got into the kitchen drawer that has all our dish towels and pulled every single one out. Then I asked her to put them all back in and she did just that. She will bring me things when I ask her to. It will be only a matter of time before I can teach her how to get on a stool and get me water!! jk!

She is learning about emotions as well. If you are sad, she will make a sad face and come up to give you a hug. If you have a boo-boo-owie, she will kiss it. If she hears a baby crying, she will make a sad face too. She is very concerned if people are not ok. I just reassure her that it's ok.

She is very curious and along with all the curiosity, comes a lot of crying too. She wants to climb and be all up in our mix lately and if we don't give her 100% off our attention or don't give her something she wants, you got it, crying and throwing things.

Tonight we were brushing our teeth and getting ready for bed and bath and Ava decided to play in the shower....



Here she is with her "where's so and so".. She puts her hands in the air and says "ohhhhh"

She is really enjoying her time with her nanny. I can tell because when she goes to leave, Ava gets upset. That usually means she is not ready for her to leave.

I am still in the process of weaning her from her paci. I was doing really good until the day she was sick. I let her have it that day, but other than that, I am only letting her have it in her crib. Again, I don't have a time frame on when I want her to be done with it, but I read that you should do it before they have all there baby teeth in, which is age 2-3, but there aren't many more teeth for her to get. I would also like her to be off it fully when the new baby is here.

Speaking of the new baby. We find out what we are having on Tuesday. It was originally supposed to be on Wednesday, but they sent me a letter saying that they had scheduled my appt when the ultrsound tech wasn't in. When I called them back, I asked for an appt on Monday or Tuesday and that is what I got. yay! I will be sure to post to let you all know. There will be so much to do at that point.

I have finally decided to finish up Ava's baby scrapbooks. I started a scrapbook before Ava was born, with the ultrasound pics, pics of me pregnant, the nursery, the showers and then wanted to finish it with some pics of her when she was born. I then started her first year scrapbook. I have 40 pages in it as of now and about 10 done. I am going to try to get it done this next week. My plan will be to have a book for every year, but we will see about that. It did take me 18 months to get that first one done and seeing that we are halfway through her second year, I am a bit behind. Then add a 2nd baby...yikes. I will have to do a page a month per child just to keep up. We all know how that goes.

new found fun and 17 weeks

Ava is learning how to feed herself, with our help of course. I have prolonged this for a while as it is a messy task. We have been giving her a spoon to eat things for a while now. I will put food on the spoon and she will take the spoon and eat off of it. I am trying to remember to give her a fork or spoon with every meal so that she can practice, but a lot of times she just wants to play with it. The other morning, we gave her oatmeal and she she was scooping it up and putting it in her mouth. Oatmeal is easiest because there is not a lot of strength involved in the "scooping" of the food. Below is a picture of her eating oatmeal.

Looking at the picture, reminded me that that was probably one of her last meals in her highchair as well. We have graduated, somewhat successfully, to a booster seat at the table a little over a week ago. It has been a bit of a struggle to keep her in it as she wants to put her feet on the table and get down most of the time. Now when she is done eating, she rips off her bib and starts to get out of her chair. I have to sit next to her with clean cloth in hand,ready to go! I am hoping she will get a bit better at sitting in it. She wants to climb up into it all the time though. We luckily have 2 of them and have put one on the floor for her to play with and sit in. I think she is going through the phase of wanting to play more than eat. I know it is common. I always try to get her to take a couple more bites when she "thinks" she is done. If it is dinner time and Mike is at the table, she will want to sit on his lap and eat. I just send over her plate and try to get him to sneak some more bites. Usually she wants what is on his plate. Most of the time it is the same thing, but sometimes it's different.


She loves to sit in small chairs. We bought this car seat at target for the purpose of it going to LA to be there for us if we need it. unfortunately it was forgotten on the last trip, so it ended up back at our house and in our family room. Ava LOVES it. Here is her sitting in it watching a video of the San Diego Zoo.

I can't believe that on Saturday she will be 18 months. Time sure does fly. We are currently working on weening her from her paci. I am only giving it to her at nap time, bed time and crib time. I have to hide them when she goes into her room because she knows right where they are and goes right for them. Sometimes she will go to her bedroom door and just cry because she wants it. I have been good about it. Next will be no paci at nap time and eventually no paci at bed time. I don't have a time frame of getting rid of it, but would like to have it done before the 2nd baby is here.

****

I just hit 17 weeks on Friday. Next Wednesday is the day we find out what we are having. I used to think I was having a boy, but now I am not so sure, so I guess we will have to wait until the 25th to find out! Here is me at 17 weeks. I finally got a camera battery and realized that I hadn't taken a picture in a while. Belly bump watch 2010!! I am feeling much better. I have more energy in the morning and early afternoon, but loose it around 3pm, then get a second wind at 7pm. I still have days where I do too much the day before and then don't feel so hot the next day. I just have to make sure to drink lots of water and try not to overdo it, which is easy to do after months of being so tired, I couldn't get off the couch.

Smiles to grumps in 60 seconds

Since my camera is still broken, I thought I would upload this video. While we were in LA, I taught Ava how to smile on command. It is similar to that friends episode when Chandler and Monica are trying to get engagement pictures and every time Chandler looks up to smile, it is awful. When you tell Ava to smile, she squints her eyes and smiles. Super cute. You can see on the video that she goes from smiling to mad in 60 seconds because I wouldn't let her have the video camera! Enjoy!

Little Miss Independent

Ava is becoming more and more independent these days. Her personality shines through more and more every day and Mike and I find ourselves saying more and more that she is "your" daughter. The dreaded climbing stage is in full force. I don't quite understand why they love it so much, but she needs to explore it. She can now get up on the couch without the help of a pillow. Sometimes she still looks for help, i.e her stool or caterpillar, to get up to on to the couch. That is not the worst of it, she then likes to try to climb on top of the back of the couch. She found a spot in the corner against the wall that she likes to stand on. It makes me nervous. I can really not leave her alone. There is a picture right there that she likes to touch. I am afraid that it is going to come crashing down. In the name of beauty, I still leave it up there instead of doing what I should do, take it down. (I would normally post a picture of it, but I still haven't gotten a new battery for my camera and of course as soon as I went to take it, it died again. I am waiting on a Best Buy gift card that I ordered from our MasterCard Rewards Points that we have). I was telling her the other day not to touch it and of course, she went put her hand right on it and smacked it, so I said "Do you want to go in time-out" and she shook her head "yes". She doesn't know what it means, but I laughed. I need to start researching some discipline options as she has also started hitting. She has hit me in the face a couple of times now in the last week and every time I grab her hand and say no, she does it again.

We are still working on words. She still isn't saying that many. It is still that annoying grunting noise that she uses most of the time. I have started saying the dreaded "Use your words". We are trying to be more strict and not do things for her if she doesn't say the word, because she knows a lot of them. She still just says the first syllable of them too. We have her 18 month check up at the end of the month and are going to talk to our pediatrician.

We both survived the first week with our new nanny. I think it will be nice to have someone interact with Ava and for me to get some work done as well as some errands/cleaning. Some of you may or may not know my work situation as I know I don't talk about it on this blog. My company, retail, has been hit hard with the economy and therefore, there is not a lot for me to do. So I usually do my work and then have time to get other things done. It is the best gig in the world. My bosses both know that I don't have a full day's work and are ok with it as long as I am getting my job done. Since I work only 3 days a week, I also make myself available to urgent issues on Thursdays and Fridays too, so I do have to work those days sometimes too. You may say, why do I need a nanny then? Well, there could be a chance that we will be able to survive this downturn and I will need to work full days and I do have weeks where there is a lot to do. Also, I wanted to have someone that I can trust for the 2nd baby, if I still have a job. That is my biggest concern. I really don't want someone new watching my new little one next year :( Ava will eventually go to daycare, but probably not until next summer as I don't want her to bring home all the germs to the new baby. So that is where my head is on the whole nanny thing.

nanny

Our new nanny started yesterday, Amanda. This is the first non family member to watch Ava. I was actually surprised at how well Ava did. She warmed up fairly quickly. She is not 100% herself yet, but she let her play with her. I played with them and got Amanda familiar with our day and where things were and then left for the 2 of them to get to know each other. When I was around, I would say Amanda was a bit shy. I think that is somewhat understandable. That is why I gave them time together. I got some cleaning done, which was nice. After she left, I felt very guilty. I don't really know why, but just had this feeling in my stomach. I think some of it is the fact that we just had a week off with Ava and that I will not be watching her 100%, even though I will be in the house and still able to play with her when I want. I always feel bad when other people have to watch Ava and she is not in a good mood. I am her mom and that is my job,but I always wonder what other people think and how they will handle her. Oh well, I just don't like change and this too will pass. Ava had a rough sleeping night last night, as I expected. She tends to wake a lot during the night on nights when there is a lot of change going on during the day. I am hoping this is the last bit of change for a while and we can get her back to sleeping through the night.