avablog

Ava’s kindergarten teacher, Ms. Michelle, warned us at the beginning of the year that we’d be surprised by how quickly Ava’s reading and writing took off after a short period of hesitation (a period we took, naturally, as a sure sign of some failure on our part to instill in our daughter a love of letters).
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Has hotel room service ever lived up to expectations?

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 good chunk of change to have them cleaned?

Does it ever go away? That passing feeling that the incredible little person standing in front of you couldn’t possibly have arisen out of your life? I get it a lot with Ava, and it’s not even so much upon hearing some particularly bright or funny thing she’s said. Mostly it’s just seeing her. The concomitant sensation is one of being set adrift, alone, as in, “Well, here she is. Now what?” It seems there are so many more ways to screw this up than to do well by my kids, I think because I always assume what I’m doing is going to damage them in some way. Too much tickling? Should we have listened to that Duran Duran song? I never should’ve corrected her spelling of “serious.”
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It’s like her artistic urges had been percolating all winter and only then were being released. Nothing like putting down some serious chalk to get you feeling back to normal.

From a walk Ava and I took downtown and back this morning. I’m home with her today for the start of her spring break. It was just awesome to hold her hand and stroll down the street, talking about birds and flowers and what an amazing day it is. I could get used to this.

Sometime today, Ava has a recital with her music teacher at school. The kids can choose to do pretty much anything they want, it sounds like, so long as it involves music. Ava, bless her sweet little heart, has decided to do an interpretive dance to Missing Persons’ “Walking In L.A.” Really. And judging by her practice session this morning, performed under the watchful and quizzical eye of her little bro, there’s gonna be a lot of ballet involved. Wish I could be there to see it. I include the link below for your listening pleasure.

Gramary took Ava out to a farm yesterday to see some goat kids. While there, Ava collected a bunch of eggs, one of which she asked me to scramble for her — with ham — last night when she got home. She was as thrilled as could be with her booty. This morning, Ava asked her Gramary if she could bring some eggs to her teacher at school. The two of them worked up a quick note and pasted it to the top of an egg carton. In the spirit of “pictures or it didn’t happen:”

There has been a request to post this video here so it’s viewable by a wider audience. Let it never be said I’m not responsive to my public.

Leah calls this “ridiculous hair.”

Really more like a cuteness explosion, to my mind, but far bet it from me to try to sway my readers.

Let’s face it: The kid owes me something for my having stayed home with him all this week while he gets over his feverish coughing sickness.
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You’ll love him when you meet him.

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 the human experience, right?
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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, and cuckoos.
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Ava’s going to be Star of the Week at her school soon. In preparation, she gets to have Geoffrey the Giraffe at home with her for a week. Our job is to take pictures of Ava and Geoffrey as they pal around together. Prior to the Star of the Week stint, then, we’re supposed to print the pictures (GAH!) and paste them up on some sort of poster or something to share with Ava’s class. It’ll be fun.
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My beloved SIL was, I hear, distraught when she learned we didn’t have a baby book underway for Emmett. I understand that this is a sensitive subject for Rachel, the second child, whose own baby book consists of a first page announcing her birth followed by page after blank, infuriating page of nothing. Were you to read it now without knowledge of Rachel’s current existence, you’d likely find yourself in the uncomfortable position of wondering whether she’d met some very, very untimely demise.
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