Florida Part 4 - At the Beach

Beautiful sky, beautiful bundled up little girl at the beach :)



Fun cold day at the beach. Actually the beach trip lasted about 30 mins. before Ava started repeating over and over again "all done, all done ocean" and we had to go home :)



Daddy doing what daddies do at the beach.

Florida Part 3 - At the Pool

Family photo at the pool! The ONLY day of our vacation that it was warm enough to swim in the pool.



Little cutie in her swimsuit.



She loved swimming! And playing with her buckets "making pancakes". (hahaha)

Florida Part 2

Ava got a lot of practice on the stairs. She became quite adept (finally) at descending the stairs on her own.



She loved watching us ride the bikes.



We played with bubbles for a long time - always a favorite activity.



And then hopped in the puddles that were left by the morning rain.

Florida Part 1 - At the Zoo

I am going to divide up the photos from our FL trip into a few different postings. The first one is from our trip to a little zoo that we took.



Here are some of the baby gators we saw! The adults were MUCH MUCH bigger, and there were a ton of them all together, all over the place. Ava loved pointing out the "aggigakers".



Ava and Grampy.





Cutie all ready for her day at the zoo!

Baby Love and Peekaboo

Playing peekaboo with Mommy.



She loves being upside down - can't wait until she can start gymnastics, I think she'll love it!

Another snow day

It's tough work looking cute all the time :) Sometimes I just need a quiet moment to drink my apple juice and collect my thoughts.



I try to keep up with friends and family on email as often as possible. I also check the baby blogs and news stories.



I've been busy letting my mom pack our stuff to go to FL on Sunday!!

Little Shirley Temple

A little photo of Ava dressed up to go to church this morning. I'm not sure why, but this reminds me of an old photo. Maybe the pose and the coat (the wool coat used to be Julia's). Either way, she looks cute! She loves to wear her "fancy shoes."

Perry taught her that when he asks "what does Mommy say?" she says "I love you!" It is adorable. And today we asked her "what does Grampy say?" and she said "Grampy says MOOOO"!!!!! So she answered in a 3 word sentence! Normally she just says "Moo," not "grampy says Moo". She says so many words I can't even begin to count them, and often says 2-3 word phrases consisting of subject and verb. She doesn't understand "me" and "you" or "mine" and "yours" so she always talks about herself in the 3rd person. But she definitely gets the point across.

Valentine's Day

Ava loves her new Valentine's Day book from Nana and Grumps! It's called "Snuggle Puppy" and is named after a song on the "Philadelphia Chickens" cd that she has - she loves the book and can say the title. And isn't she just so cute?



Listening to her Valentine's card :) She loves the cards that play music when you open them.



More investigation of the book. She also had a little Valentine's party at her school that Perry and I went to. It was fun. Her favorite thing was the cupcakes!

Kitchen

Ava got a play kitchen today!!! It is fabulous. It was only $45 at Walmart..... but we discovered it was so cheap because we had to completely assemble the entire thing ourselves. It took over 2 hrs of both of us working on it to put it together! But it's worth it - it has a stove, oven, microwave, dishwasher, fridge, sink, and cabinets. Also pots/pans/plates/cups/cutlery. And a cordless phone!



Ava was "cooking" up some treats tonight - on the menu was baked Play-Doh!! She kept "checking" it in the oven to see if it was done (imitating me). She is a very busy little girl and is very happy to be "bustling" around her little kitchen like quite the little suzie homemaker :)

Fun in the laundry bin

What a goofy kid! They do the funniest things. Look at that perfect drumming form! She was doing a great job - just sitting there in the laundry bin, drumming away.....

SNOW!!!!!

Well you may have heard that it snowed a little bit last weekend........



It was way too deep for Zoey to walk in it. She refused to pee and poop in the yard.



I decided to continue the Pendley tradition of baking cinnamon rolls from scratch on a snow day. We were totally snowed-in - absolutely impossible to go anywhere all day Saturday. And a good thing, since the cinnamon rolls take about 5 hrs to make!! Boy were they YUMMY! They turned out great. We ate half and brought the other half (pictured above) to a Super Bowl party on Sunday, where they were a huge hit.



A picture down our street taken Saturday afternoon. You can see that the snow is quite deep!

Praying

This is Ava's prayer posture. She loves to pray recently, and asks me to pray "again" and "again." She loves to say "Amen" at the end, and she is pretty good about closing her eyes and putting her hands up to her face to pray. She was obviously peeking in this picture, but that might just be because she knew the camera was out! It is so adorable. She will even remind me when we sit down to eat if I forget to pray. She says something like "dear jesus blehta hesoitja oaisdhfoij amen." :-)

Ava is learning how to sing bits and pieces of songs, such as "twinkle twinkle little star," "ashes ashes all fall down," "row, row, row your boat," and the "wiggle wiggle wiggle" song from the Mickey Mouse clubhouse album (a new favorite). It is so amazing how quickly she is learning. I think that in a few months she'll be able to sing entire songs on her own. She can also count from one to two :) Haha I know that's not much. But she does understand what "two" is and will say "two" when she has two of something. I'm trying to work on teaching her "three" but she seems to have some sort of mental block with that one. Maybe soon she'll figure it out.

Just a cute photo of Ava and Daddy hanging out. She was allowed to watch a Winnie the Pooh show for a while since she's been sick this weekend and was a little cranky. With age, her attention span is lengthening and she will actually sit still for 30 mins or more to watch a show. She's feeling better today, but I think she's getting a little stir-crazy from being in the house all day for the last 3 days! Poor thing.

This is really only her second illness of the school year so far (not including the pink eye). So I'm pretty impressed with Kinder Care, because I know other kids in daycares who seem to be sick more than they are healthy. We are so fortunate to have a clean, safe, fun, educational place to take her. And she enjoys her time there, too. I would heartily recommend our center to anyone.

Feeding the Cat

Ava loves the cat a lot more than the cat loves her back. She tries very hard to pet Li-li, and to get her to sit in her lap. That NEVER happens :) Ava sees Li-li sitting in my lap, and so she pats her own lap saying "li-li, li-li, up, up!". It is so cute.

In these photos she was intrigued with watching Li-li eat her food. Then she sat down right next to her and started patting her legs saying "Li-li, li-li, lap, lap, up, up!" But Li-li was much too focused on eating her breakfast to worry about what Ava wanted.

Coloring

Coloring is a new favorite activity. Part of the fun is dumping all the crayons out and trying to put them back in the box. But she also does scribble around on the page. She almost always uses her left hand when she holds a crayon so we think she may be left-handed even though Perry and I are both right-handed.

Mr. Potato Head

Meet Mr. Potato Head, aka "taboe" - it always sounds like Ava is saying the word "table" but she is in fact talking about the Potato Head.... ALL THE TIME!! She is pretty much obsessed. We gave her a large bin with 4 potato head dolls and assorted body parts for Christmas. She loves them all, and I guess it has helped her learn the body parts and where things go on a body too. She loves the mustache and calls it "stash". The potato in this photo is actually a female, sporting feminine shoes, visor, and eyeshadow, but Ava insisted that she needed a "stash" so she has one.

Her other favorite thing to do is to make her toys "sleepy" and then pat their backs and cover them with her Pooh lovey blanket. This is cute and fine, but with the larger Potato Head dolls that have the butt flap in the back (so you can store things inside them), the "butts" fall off when she pats them too vigorously! This upsets her, and she then cries "butt, butt, butt!" until one of us puts the butt back on. Then she makes the butt fall off again. They really do not stay attached very well. I believe that this is a design flaw, and Perry and I do not remember having this problem with our Mr. Potato Heads back in the 80's!!!!

Mommy and me sweatshirts! The future 5th generation of Penn women :) This cute Penn sweatshirt was a gift from my grandparents to Ava for Christmas.

It is very hard to snap a good photo of her these days! She's either covering her face, reaching for the camera, or squirming around. Hence my weird face in the second photo - it was the best one we got so I just kept it.

New Dining Room Light!

I have the most wonderful husband! He is such a good handyman and is so smart, even with jobs he's never done before!

Our chandelier was half dead - fewer than 50% of the lights were functional. We picked out a new light fixture that is a cute mini-ceiling fan with a light. Perry installed it with absolutely no problems whatsoever!

Here's a pic of the old crappy chandelier:


And here is Perry next to his handiwork - the new fan/light!! Isn't it cute?



And here's a cute, happy Ava picture, just because :-)

Christmas festivities

Spent Christmas at the Pendley house in Evergreen, CO!
Ava had a great time playing in her indoor tent/house/tunnel playset.



Christmas day in CO. We had a white Christmas (although, ironically, with less snow than we got back east).


Pendley family photo shoot for the Christmas card.

A later Christmas celebration at the Hodge house over New Years.



Ava LOVES her little duck stuffed animal/pillow/ottoman!

Great family photo taken at a New Years party at Aunt Susan and Uncle Andy's house.

Three of the little cousins at the New Years party. They are watching Elmo on Katie's iPhone!!! How cute! They had such a great time together, it was hilarious.