Snow Day!

Lots of snow over the weekend! Ava was interested in it, and was trying to help Daddy shovel with her little plastic shovel. However, her efforts were hampered by her absolute REFUSAL to wear her mittens, which makes for cold hands and unhappy times in the snow. By the way, she also REFUSED to wear her boots.




I tried to get a picture of her goopy pink eye eyes. This was Sunday so they were starting to look better. Poor baby - she sure hates getting her eye medicine.

You can also see in the background my beautiful new Keurig Select coffeemaker!!! YAY! Thank you husband Perry and Lis and Perry! It makes YUMMY coffee and is so nice and easy. It can also make tea and hot chocolate! Here's a better shot of it:

Thanksgiving and etc.

Ava finally figured out how to walk and push the poppy ball thing at the same time.


The whole Hodge side of the family together for Thanksgiving dinner.


Us at the Hodge house over Thanksgiving. Ava loves "playing" the piano :)


Happy Ava rolling on the floor.


Nothing much new is going on around here. Perry is busy studying for finals and writing papers. We have been busy with the usual Christmas season stuff. I am thinking about starting to train for another marathon (4/10/09 in Lancaster). (i.e. this would actually be the end of week 1 of training!) We'll see how that goes.

A new cute thing that Ava has been doing lately is saying "hug" and hugging us, stuffed animals, the dog, etc. It's really adorable! And she says it when she's scared and needs comforting, too. She is really obsessed with Winnie the Pooh now, and asks all the time to watch Pooh on tv (we have videos) - this is getting to be a problem because she really likes it, but I don't want her to watch much tv! I didn't think this day would come so soon...... I just need to continue to be strict about limiting tv even though she asks for it. She doesn't watch it daily, and on the days that she does watch it, it's for about 30 mins or so.

Happy Sunday! Here is Ava in her beautiful little Christmas dress (that she wore to church today), given to us by her great-grandma! So lovely to have a great-grandma with good taste in clothing :) The first photo shows her with her bubbles. She LOVES blowing bubbles. She can blow, but doesn't have the coordination to actually blow in the right spot to make the bubbles. But she loves to watch and say "bubble" and chase the bubbles around.

We got to see a beautiful newborn baby girl at church today - our friend Karrie's baby Abigail. Her cord blood pH was low when she was born, so she was tranferred to Jefferson hospital to have hypothermia induced to prevent brain injury - apparently a very new procedure. She was kept at 92 degrees body temp for 3 days! She is doing great now, though, and is SO CUTE!

Relaxing weekend

This weekend we are having a relaxing weekend. I got my hair cut and colored (finally! after 4 mos!), Perry has gotten some work done, I'm putting up Christmas decorations, and last night we watched the Star Trek movie (which was really good!). Tomorrow we really need to work on the leaves in the yard.

The first photo is Ava in her chair saying "cheese!". The second photo is Ava at breakfast inhaling her blueberries - she LOVES them! She also LOVES to have music on, and will point to the stereo while bouncing up and down (i.e. "dancing") to get us to turn it on! I am going to try to post some video of her dancing maybe tomorrow. Recently she has been mumbling "I love you" when we put her to bed! It's so cute! (although it only vaguely resembles the way it is supposed to sound) Her new little bossy thing to do is to pull us over to the couch by the finger, and then point out the spot on the couch where she would like us to sit. It's pretty funny.

Hopefully Ava will enjoy her Thanksgiving dinner this year! I think she was asleep for it last year....

Back to the 80's

One of Ava's new favorite books is one from my childhood: She-Ra, Princess of Power!! For some reason she loves this book, and likes to sit by herself in the rocking chair reading it. If I try to sit in the rocking chair, she pulls me off. It's hilarious to me because She-Ra is totally 80's and most kids her age have never even heard of She-Ra!








We are looking forward to a relaxing weekend and hoping the Eagles beat the Chargers tomorrow! We are having friends over for chili at our house to watch the game.

We have been praying for another baby Ava, 3 month old Ava Elisabeth Benton, a friend's child who is in the PICU at A.I. Dupont Hospital. She is presumed to have a mitochondrial disease that is incurable. They had a baby boy 6 yrs ago who died of a mitochondrial disease (probably the same disease) at 4 months of age. It is so heartbreaking to watch this family have to go through this again. You can read their story and updates on baby Ava at www.fourlittleladybugs.blogspot.com.

Halloween

Here are some photos of Ava on Halloween. She was dressed as a cow (complete with tail!) courtesy of Nana. She was really cute and she LOVED the outfit. In the days preceding the holiday, she would say "Moo" every time she saw her costume!

She can say many different animal noises now - quack, moo, meow, ruff, roar, hiss, hoot hoot... but her favorite by far is the mouse - eee eee eee!!! She cracks up whenever we do the mouse sound.

Verbally she is growing daily by leaps and bounds. It's hard to tell at this point if some of the words are just mimicry or if she actually understands what they mean, but she pretty much tries to copy everything we say. Recent new words have been giraffe, baggie, tag, all done. AND - unfortunately - we have finally accepted that she is saying MINE!!! For a week or so she's been going around saying what sounds like my, my, my. I thought it was just a sound she was making and was in denial about her saying mine (because I hate it when kids say that!).... but it's pretty clear now that that's what she means. Oh well, maybe she'll grow out of it quickly :)

First Blog!

Well, I've finally decided to start blogging! I have enjoyed following the blogs of so many friends both near and far, that I have been inspired to start one for the Pendleys. I hope this will help everyone keep up with what's going on in our lives and help us to stay in touch. I will try to post lots of pics of Ava growing up and doing new things. Thanks for reading!!!!