avablog

Ava’s just started riding her bike to school in the last week. It seems like we’ve waited a long time for our daughter to take to her wheels, but now that she’s up, it’s difficult to get her to slow down. The new method of transportation also seems to have reestablished her friendship with her [...]

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agp summer dance It was pretty wonderful to watch Ava dance on the pedestrian mall this past Friday night. She was all alone out there, save for the shirtless drunk guy who appeared, wandered off, then reappeared to request his favorite song.

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petals n droplets I figure this shot alone justifies the purchase of my 100mm macro lens, even if I never sell a print. This flower has opened since I took this, and it’s beautiful, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be as pretty as it was in this moment.

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magnolia w bee The 2011 flower macro season. If you ain’t down with photos of pretty flowers, you’ll want to avoid my flickr stream for the next four months or so.

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baby blanket rocker To accompany the hat, of course. This is what I’d set out to make for a baby gift for Rachel and Kevin. It was the simplest pattern I could find and turned out to be a great first project. I had some yarn left over, so I made the cap, too. I [...]

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knit baby cap I made this cap for Rachel and Kevin’s baby, who is due May 23. Not a great time of year to be sporting a wool cap, but hopefully they’ll get a little use out of it.

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ecp croci1 Here’s a picture of Emmett from this past weekend. He was marveling at the bursts of crocuses blooming in a neighbor’s yard; it seemed like a good opportunity for a spring photo.

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agp jump shadow Jumping rope is one of Ava’s new hobbies. Like everything she gets involved in, she wants to be perfect at it within minutes of picking it up. This approach is good for her focus and perseverance, but bad for her patience. The best thing to do is back off and give her [...]

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Emmett now seems to be entirely over his recent bout with pneumonia, and Ava’s been crazy about getting out into the piles and piles of snow that still linger after our recent storm.

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Dear, earnest Leah ignited a firestorm on her Facebook page the last couple days when, after posting a picture of Emmett and professing her undying love for the child, she received a comment on said picture from a friend who opined that the love a parent has for a child is a unique kind of [...]

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This is not a fancy, thoughtful post. It is just a quick list of things I want to write down for our children to read someday. I guess I’m just trying to do a brief snapshot of this moment in time in their lives.

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“The world is, the world is, Love and life are deep, Maybe as his eyes are wide.” I don’t tell my husband nearly often enough that he is a good father and a good husband–and that I love him to bits. This has been on my mind for awhile, but what really got me thinking [...]

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Do you clean the windows in your home (inside and out)? If so, how many times a year/decade? And if you lived in an old house (with old, difficult-to-clean windows) where the windows hadn’t been cleaned (inside or out) in at least eight years, and they were totally dull and grimy, would you spend a [...]

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I remember plaid skirts and playing “Smurfs” at recess. I remember erasers and school lunches . . . the smell of Lysol and sweaty gyms. I remember feeling scared, shy, and homesick. Kindergarten and the early years of elementary school weren’t easy for me. I felt shy and socially awkward, embarrassed and overwhelmed. Welcome to [...]

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One room in his house was full of dusty clocks. There were tall grandfather clocks and round wooden ones. Mantel clocks and small alarm clocks. There was even a cuckoo clock with a tiny brown-and-white bird. And they all were set to go off at the same time, in a cacophony of chimes, dings, bongs, [...]

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That is all. Posted via email from nicheplayer’s posterous

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Question: Is it okay for one spouse to make a major, personal purchase (for an item worth more than $500) without consulting with the other spouse? (Keeping in mind that the spouses have separate checking/savings accounts and split the household bills fairly evenly between the two.) What do all of you blog readers think? Acceptable [...]

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You’re starting to figure out how to coordinate them in your endless quest for trouble, little brother. Though you’ve been creeping and stomach crawling for a couple of months now, this afternoon we hit a milestone: You crawled all the way across the rug on your hands and knees! Huzzah! What a grand way to [...]

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Dear Ava, Your dad always accuses me of never writing anything on this blog, so I thought I’d better log on quickly, at the end of this lovely Christmas Day, to document a few small, sweet moments from our recent celebrations. The first is a remark you made yesterday, after attending an afternoon children’s service [...]

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My dearest little one: Life isn’t fair, is it? Here we’ve spent hours and days writing odes of love to your sister, and all we’ve given you are some lousy “moment of cuteness” photo posts! I think this brief Emmett update is long overdue.

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