ava at 18 months

ava at 18 months

picture taken by Z

so, this post is a bit late.  she is actually 20 months old now.  i cannot believe it!  in not that many months my baby girl will be two.  it's incomprehensible! ahhhhhh!  she has changed and grown so so much in the last 6 months.  she is like this tiny big girl.  she has a big personality, has become very independent in so many ways, is talking more, bosses everyone around and just runs around amazing me everyday.  in the past several months, more of her personality is coming out and she appears to be very headstrong like her brother, extremely capable, sometimes cranky.  actually sometimes she gets mad at us, and she has these big pouty lips and shouts "nooooo!" in her tiny munchkin voice and it's hard not to laugh because she is so small and adorable that it's kinda funny when she gets upset like that.  she loves playing, reading books, being outside, she loves her baba and when hubs comes home she runs over smiles really big and says "babaaaaaa!".  she enjoys playing with big brother, but doesn't do everything that he does, she plays on her own, too.  she is in this phase right now where she is especially clingy to me.  she is very loving, giving us hugs and kisses all the time.

in palo alto for thanksgiving

christmas time

winter time play

playing in the snow

a little after her first birthday is when she started taking her first steps to walk by herself.  and then she walked for a couple months, and then she started to try to run to keep up with her older brother, and now she basically runs everywhere, just like Z.  they both run all over the house.  she loves to climb, she is like a mountain goat.  she actually has really excellent balance, so she does pretty well when she climbs up stuff.  and now, going through old pics of her i remember that it started young with her, she started climbing up on stuff before she could walk.

climbing, as always

ayyam-i-ha

she is talking more and more now.  hubs and i were not really worried, but just aware that she wasn't super verbal like Z was at a year old or even at 18 months.  i was trying to not compare the two kids, but we did.  not in a bad way, but just because it was interesting.  they are different people and have different skills and talents.  apparently Z is extremely verbal and articulate and Ava is not so much.  she is actually very good with her fine and gross motor skills.  but they are both intelligent little souls.  anyway, so she wasn't talking that much at all until probably 2 months ago.  just all of a sudden, when my in-laws were visiting, she just started saying more and more words.  she doesn't speak in complete sentences yet, but she still communicates what she needs or wants really clearly.  for example, if she wants you to do something, like wrap one of her baby dolls up in a blanket, she will bring you the blanket, and the baby, and say "uh-uh" and kind of show you what she wants you to do.  or she will go and grab a cup from their drawer of dishes and run over to the fridge and point and say "wa-wa".  or in my case, in the morning she screams "ma-maaaaaaa!!!!  pah-caaaaaaakkkkkee!!!!!" until she has a fork in hand, piercing it into a syrup covered bite of pancake from her plate.  she says lots of words now, and learns new words daily.  Z actually helps a lot with this, because he will correct her sometimes, or ask her to say a word and help her say it.  it's pretty adorable.  she is just starting to say please and thank you in combination with some other word, like if she wants a bite of my food, she sometimes will say "bite peeeeease".  or she will just scream "biiiiiiiiite!  ma-maaaaaaa! biiiiite!" but i'm working with her on it.  and up until just 2 weeks ago, she wouldn't even say the words "thank you" at all, she would just kind of hum the intonation of what "thank you" sounds like---"hm hmmmmm".  my mother in law would say, "ava, you have to say the words you can't just sing the music" and it would crack me up.  but now she started saying thank you.  she is starting to string other words, if she is looking for the neighbor cat, she says "yie-nissss, aaah youuuu?" or if she is trying to find Z, "abbyyyy, aaaah youuuu?".

pic taken by z

she loves to dress up in her brother's super hero outfits

coloring at the easel in z's preschool class

she loves riding this bike

she is quite the active girl.  she is always running around, playing, climbing, trying to get outside.  she loves being outside.  when we are inside, ava likes to play with Z's rescue bots, she likes to build legos, play with play dough, color, paint, work in their play kitchen, ride on the rocking airplane, play around in their little tent, play with stickers, she loves it all.  oh, ava looooooves books.  she will even sit down with one of her favorites (Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes), and flip through the pages, pointing and say "toes", "fingers", "baby", almost like she is reading it to herself.  she recently got a little toy cat stuffed animal, and she loves it, she walks around with it and says "meooooow" a million times.  she is really getting into cats, and baby dolls, and babies.  she is really interested in real life babies.  when we are outside, ava loves to ride her little trike thingy, or her push car, she tries to ride Z's scooter and balance bike but she is just too little.  she is always trying to do things that she is too little for.  she is extremely adventurous.  the park is another favorite, as is the children's museum.  haha, there's not much that she doesn't enjoy doing as far as play goes.  i remember when we would drop Z off at preschool, she would always make a bee-line for the tactile table, and then she would check out what painting activity was going on, and sometimes she would color on the easel.  she wanted to do all those things, too, and didn't want to leave.  so i think she will for sure be ready for preschool when she is 3.  one thing she did a couple weeks ago that i wasn't expecting was to hang on this bar thing at the playground, and swing back and forth.  i was so surprised!  i didn't know she could do that!  and Z didn't do that until just recently.  she is very strong and very physically curious, or adventurous.  Z is very curious about why things work the way they do, or why they are the way they are, etc, and ava is very curious to see whether or not she can climb up a steep climbing toy all by herself.  hahaha, they are very similar and very different in a lot of ways.

stacking blocks

so upset that i wouldn't give her any more chocolate

this girl loves to eat.  and she is a good eater.  she has a voracious appetite, and if we are at a potluck or party or something where food is around, she basically grazes and is munching on something the entire time.  so far, there isn't really anything that she won't eat or doesn't like.  i'm sooooo thankful and hope that this does not change much.  she eats more than Z by far, in variety and in quantity.  she will eat her entire breakfast of yogurt, cereal, an egg, some fruit, and then want to eat half of my breakfast, too.  this is so good, because she is such a petite, tiny little person that at least i know she is built that way and not because she is not well nourished or unhealthy.  oh and one thing she does that cracks me up; when she is eating at her high chair, she tells us when she is done, so then when we go to take away the tray, she quickly grabs handfuls of food and shoves them in her mouth before the tray is removed.  it's so funny, i don't know why she does that.

in her fancy dress

we are still nursing during the day.  if she is busy and distracted, she is fine with only nursing in the morning, maybe once in the middle of the day, and then once a little before bed.  but lately, like in the last week, she is very clingy to me and wants to nurse quite often during the day.  i'm not sure what's going on.  i seem to remember kids going through a phase around this age where they prefer mom.  she has been night weaned for a little while now.  i am at the point now where i am ready to fully wean her from nursing.  i'm ready to be done, even though it will be a little sad.  i still have to figure out how to get that going.  it's hard since she's with me all day everyday.  and she still has her binky, she is obsessed with it, even more than Z was with his.  but perhaps after we are done weaning from nursing we can work on the pinky.

eeeeeeeee

cheesing

as of right now we are still putting her in cloth diapers.  i wanted to potty train her when she was 18 months old but she is not quite ready yet, and i read something that said around the age of 2 is better, so i'll try it then.  i can't wait to be done with changing diapers.

hugging her baby

cutie

when Z goes to pre-K this year, i'll have a little more time to spend one on one with little miss A and so i plan on doing some age appropriate activities so that she can start to learn her colors and numbers, etc.  i also would like to get her into a toddler dance class and maybe the little gym.  she loves to dance, she loves to climb and hang from stuff.  i think she will enjoy it.

she loves the children's museum

in palo alto

ridvan

i just can't believe how she has just turned into this little person so quickly.  she barely seems like the same baby that we had just last year, who was learning how to crawl.  it really does go by so fast.  man!  but i am excited to see what kind of little girl she grows into.

the best side eye