17 Months

This month was marked by our 12 day getaway to Cape May, NJ with Blair's family. Blair and I have spent time there together every summer since 1999, we got engaged there in 2005, married there in 2006 and then took our baby there for the first time last summer. It is a special, relaxing and rejuvenating place for us and it was such a treat to watch Ava fall in love with it too!

She had an amazing time, grew up immensely, loved the attention of 8 adults and all the new experiences that came with a beach vacation. Though she wasn't a fan of the roaring ocean, Ava loved playing in the sand and splashing around in her pool full of salt water. It took a day or two to ease into it but by the end of the week, Ava was covered in sand and loving it!

In the past couple of months Ava has started to enjoy having others attention but this month she has become much more outgoing, loud and eager to show off all of her toys and tricks. Her fantastic sense of humor that she's had since she was an infant is definitely turning into an adorable and well developed sense of self. She is still very observant, aware of others and their response to her, and has a quick wit even in the way she uses her eyes and body language. She is definitely the most interesting person I know and I love just watching her interact with her world!

These last couple weeks have been big on the language front. Ava does a lot of "noises" which only mom can decipher, but has just started speaking in short sentences and trying harder to make comprehensible words. She loves to sing "the happy song" ("Oh Happiness" by David Crowder Band) which sounds like this, "Happy, happy, happy" in the cutest, highest pitched little voice you can imagine. She also can say almost everyone's name in our extended family and can repeat many words and phrases. Things she has recently said on her own: get down, oh man, love you, thank you (without being prompted), and a much clearer version of mommy! For the first time in the last couple of weeks she is also actually referring to me as mama which melts my heart! Also, the other day, Blair reprimanded her for doing something and she ran full speed into the kitchen and said to me, "Daddy say no no"! I am so ready and excited to enter this time of her life, not only to watch her vocabulary develop but also to hear what sorts of things she's thinking about and wanting to share.

Oh, and have I yet to mention?! She got her first two teeth!! Alas, they do exist! I was beginning to wonder if they do toddler tooth extraction when the first ones popped through a few weeks ago, bottom center. It has been over a month now and they are still maybe a quarter of the way up (they really are just pushing through so slowly!) but now you can spot them when she flashes a big smile. I can't wait to see what teeth are next and what she looks like with a full mouth!

I will end this post with a few pictures to wet your appetite, the rest are in the August album to the left.

As for the other details... Ava is being stuffed into her 18-month summer clothes but can comfortably now fit into 24-months. I forgetting to include shoe size, she's in size 5's right now but will definitely be in size 6 in the fall. She's still wearing size 4 diapers though we are nearing the end of that era as well and soon I will try putting size 5's on her at night. She still takes two naps a day, for somewhere between 1 and 2 hours each, depending on the circumstances. Since she's been teething for so long, it's hard to know what she would do if not for that! On weeks where there are no signs of teething she usually takes two 2-hr naps, but those are few and far between. She is also still sleeping at night for 12 - 13.5 hours, sometimes not waking until close to 9am! I am a spoiled mommy, for sure.