Life with Ava

Since Ava joined our family our social life has expanded by leaps and bounds. It's amazing how busy we are these days. Our dance card was booked solid for Saturday and it started bright and early this morning. J owes me big time since I was up all night with a sinus headache and still managed to be up and at 'em (and on the road) by 8:30AM.

Out first stop was a Geocaching event called a CITO held at Woodstock Park in Virginia Beach. A CITO (Cache In Trash Out) is basically a volunteer event where a group of geocachers get together and volunteer to clean or spruce up a park or nature preserve. This particular park was chosen because one of the group geocachers is an employee there and the agenda today was to clean up brush, plant some bulbs, and paint one of the shelters. Some of the initial feedback indicated that the few hours volunteered this morning saved the park over $1800 and at least a week's worth of work.

J was pretty excited about this as geocachers form a pretty tight knit group and many of these folks have been anxiously awaiting Ava's arrival right along with us. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on whos viewpoint) Ava was napping in the car seat when we arrived so I stayed in the car with her until she woke up. This also helped me deal with the headache. She was a hit, of course, once she woke and we made our way to the picnic shelter. J went off to work and I stayed in the shade with Ava.

She did really well with meeting lots of new people. She managed to get over some of the shyness and would walk to and interact with folks, but she's still not keen on having anyone else hold her when we're around. We're definitely her preferred choice but I was very pleased that she is becoming more outgoing (just a little but it's a big step for her).

Here she is hanging with Dad:

She made a new friend, a deaf Great Dane named Maggie:

Ava even got a kiss:

She hung with Dad and Anne for a while and then decided it was time to come to Mom. She took off which freaked me out because this was a hard concrete floor and I had visions of heads clunking on it.

After finishing up there we headed to the HRFCC Spring Kite Festival held at Little Island Park in Sandbridge. This is BFE, people. It took us forever to get there but it was chosen as the most likely place to have enough wind to actually fly the kites. No problems there!

There were tons of folks there and so many cute little (and some not so little) Chinese kids out and about. There was a picnic shelter for us but most folks were out on the beach. We went out for a little while but it was HOT and I didn't have any sunscreen on me which is dangerous since I fry in about 13.2 seconds.

Ava got an up close and personal glimpse at the Atlantic:

Not too sure about this:

And didn't like it at all when that cold water hit her feet:

The unhappy yells could be heard for miles, I'm sure. I scooped her up posthaste.

We also got to see our friends that we traveled with in China. Their daughter and Ava came from the same town and are only a couple of weeks apart in age.

Their baby (I won't use her name since I don't have their permission) is an absolute trip and we just adore her. She is sooooo funny and is a doll.

We hung around there for a little over an hour until Miss Ava started getting cranky/sleepy and then headed out for our final big stop of the day to visit an old friend of mine who had some things for Ava. Shawn has a 30 month old so Ava was the lucky recipient of some toys and (lots of) clothes. Shawn has taste exactly like mine so the clothes are not too girly and are great. We didn't stay too long due to the cranky/sleepy baby who crashed in the car seat as soon as we got going and slept for over an hour while J let me run into Babies-r-us to buy more BPA free bottles and sippy cups. I've decided to throw away all the ($$$) plastic Dr. Brown's bottles since they are not BPA free. I replaced them with Green to Grow and Born Free bottles, of which she prefers the Born Free ones which is, of course, the ones I bought fewer of.

The girl was still about an hour short of her usual naptimes through the day so we've paid for that. She went down for bed about 45 minutes earlier than usual but has been very restless tonight. After trying to soothe her in the crib for about 30 minutes I finally caved and picked her up. We gave her another 5 ounces of milk and she was asleep in 2 seconds so she may really have been thirsty. This guessing game is so hard sometimes.

It was a long, but good, day.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Ava, Everything Else . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.