avablog

Hold onto your hat. This one is going to blow the top off the cuteness meter: Ava holding Lila at our office trick-or-treat function last evening.

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This stuff always cheers me up. Ava was dying to sit on the tractor that was pulling the hay rack at the apple orchard we visited with Rachel and Kevin last weekend. Thankfully, there aren’t many buttons or dials for Ava to screw up on an old International Harvester. Those pumpkins in the background represented […]

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I don’t know anyone who’s taken a driver’s exam recently, so I’m not positive they’re still teaching the same things they were when I last took the exam. The part I’m most curious about is the section on road markings. Do they still cover the differences between solid, broken, yellow, and white lines? Because I’m […]

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Why does my child eat better when she’s watching TV? It’s like she’s on autopilot, munching away while she watches Ms. Honey lead her class through alphabet exercises. It’s weird.

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It was an absolutely gorgeous day in Madison today. We walked to a little patisserie near Kevin and Rachel’s house for breakfast. There were some really cool bike racks outside the place: After a nice snack, we hoofed it the two miles or so over to the farmer’s market at Hilldale Mall. We stopped for […]

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This one was just too good to pass up. At one point during our time at home yesterday, Ava wanted to go outside and look at the rain. That happened to coincide with the students getting out of the nearby high school for the day, so we sat for a bit and watched the kids […]

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OK, well, it’s not so private, obviously, is it? And I’m not really ashamed, since there’s not much I can do about the situation. But I love the provocative title, and I’m sure my RSS subscriber(s) do(es) too. Leah stopped off at her Ob/Gyn’s office this morning to pick up another analysis kit for me […]

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The kid’s got a bug that’s keeping her out of daycare today, so I’m home with her. We went to the doctor’s office this morning to get her checked out, and there’s no ear infection and no strep. Before we left, I made Ava some pancakes: Leah’s been hounding me for quite a while to […]

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Went to the dentist this morning for a cleaning and checkup. Everything’s A-OK. Not to brag, but the hygienist positively gushed about the condition of my soft tissue. I’m so proud. She’d know about it, too, because she drove her f#*king little metal hook down into my gums far enough to pull my tonsils (yes, […]

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Grandma Georgie has a set of window decals for every event and season. Here, Ava’s helping G.G. put up the Halloween-themed pumpkins and skeletons on the TV room windows: It’s unlikely I ever would’ve gotten this shot with my A620. There just wasn’t enough light, and by the time the A620 grabbed focus, Ava would’ve […]

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The instructions for my WordPress software upgrade suggest that I write a post about the upgrade after I’m done. Well, I did the upgrade last night, and all seems well. I think I might come to love the tags support. This morning Ava was pretending to be a baby elephant. She got a Babar book […]

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This past Saturday we attended the long-awaited Ralph’s World concert at Englert Theater here in Iowa City. It was a lot of fun. In the middle of the first tune, Ava declared she wanted to go back to the car. Leah and I were a bit taken aback, but by the third song, all the […]

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It seems like I should make some note of the amazing changes lately in the online music world, since I enjoy music, and particularly music that I can research and buy without prying my big arse off the sofa. Amazon.com recently announced the beta of their online music download store, which offers a million or […]

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I’ve been taking lots of pictures the last couple days. My Flickr photostream is flowing pretty fast. I love running around and capturing as many different images of the same scene as I can. What did people do before the advent of CF cards? I remember flipping through the envelopes of photos my grandmother would […]

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Ssshh! Don’t tell anyone I showed you this: It’s a surprise!

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Meredith Willson would’ve been proud. Between the UI’s homecoming parade on Friday night and the high school marching band competition that took place one block from our house on Saturday, Ava had her fill of drums, tubas, and flutes over the weekend. What’s more, the girls in the flag corps gave me a great opportunity […]

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We were all getting ready to go this morning when Ava went into the bathroom and asked for some privacy (as she always does when there’s a #2 on deck). After a couple minutes I peeked in to see how she was doing, and she was standing next to the toilet, peering into the bowl. […]

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Ava and I walked up the the nearby high school last evening to play with her ball. I used the opportunity to get some shots with the 75-300mm lens my friend Q loaned me. It’s a beauty. Not only did we have fun tossing the ball around, but I got some cool pictures, too. Here, […]

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I wonder often about the physiological changes a person undergoes when they have a child. I’ve noticed that I occasionally get this weird feeling like I’m expressing some unconscious trait that I didn’t know I had. Is it too far out there to think that my body has undergone some of the same — or […]

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What I need is a graph that shows the number of pictures I’ve taken over the last three years. I wonder if it will spike now that I have the new camera. Probably. Just as it did each time I’ve had a new camera. I think Flickr can do something like that. Too bad there’s […]

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