ava's blog

okay, yes, i know, we've been seriously slacking on the pictures around here lately. that doesn't mean we've been slacking on little adventures though ....

since january has been a rather rainy month, ava and daddy have had to branch out from their usual playground or bike adventures. they've been downtown to see to see a movie twice, and then out to dinner for a fancy meal at denny's. at denny's ava got to peruse the menu and order her pancakes - all on her own!

this sunday there was a welcome break in the rain, so ava and daddy took the train down to the ferry building, then took a ferry over to sausalito. they hung out with the rich and famous for awhile, and enjoyed the view across the bay, before hopping back on the next ferry home. unfotunately, i sent them off with a camera with a dead battery, hence all we have to commemorate their adventure is this iphone snapshot.

when ava is quiet during her "nap time", i'm finally coming to realize that one of two things is going on. either, she's asleep (rare) ... or ... she's up to something.

a few weeks ago, we tucked in for nap with a set of markers in her room . . . and ducky emerged with some interesting "make-up". last week, it was a pair of scissors. thank goodness it was only an inexpensive fairy doll that came out an hour later with a buzz cut!

this week it was a box of bandaids. apparently, ducky had a few accidents. we hope he feels better soon.

on january 9th, 2010 ava and paulo launched their future soccer careers.

now, paulo comes from solid, brazilian, soccer-playing stock, so we were all pretty optimistic about his performance on the field. ava... not so much. although there are many athletic endeavors that john and i enjoy, we both discovered our athletic sides later in lives. also, ball sports... or for that matter... team sports? yeah - we're really not very gifted. in fact, it would be fair to say that i am, in fact, notoriously ungifted. (cue ye old story about cailin sitting down in the grass and picking flowers in left field of a baseball game.)

to try and save ava from a similar fate, many advised getting her started on some sort of ball sport and an impressionable young age. soccer is a popular one in san francisco, so, here we are.

although i had very low expectations for ava's introduction to soccer, i have to say, she far exceeded my wildest dreams. knock me over with a feather ... she just ran out there and ... played soccer. i'm certainly not saying that she looked like the next . but she did it. she kicked when they said kick, kept track of which ball was her ball, stopped when they said stop, and mostly remembered the rules of the game.

i'll be damned .. . maybe she's not exactly like her mommy after all!

"nap time" is not optional for ava on the weekends, but actually sleeping in. when she was little, of course, we made sure she slept - otherwise she was just a disaster in the evening. then we went through a phase where we preferred that she did not sleep - otherwise she was too hard to get to bed. these days, we don't really care either way. ava's bedtime performances don't seem particularly correlated with how much sleep she's actually had or needs.

so, we just put her in her room and close the door. surprisingly, about 33% of the time, she actually decides of her own little accord that she'll crawl into bed and have a little snooze. today was one of those days, and when we went in to wake her up, we found her sleeping arrangement quite amusing.

ava spent another lovely white christmas with grandma, in thunder bay. ava and grandma headed up to the great white north early, on december 8th, and john and i joined them on christmas eve.

john is sometimes given to flights of culinary fancy . . . and sometimes to flights of british fancy. both of these tend to have lovely results, but when the two combine, the journey can be... well... a journey.

john's latest "british cooking project" obsession was a traditional british christmas cake. in case you, dear reader, are not british, think fruit-cake covered in marzipan, covered in white icing. optionally, decorated with little handmade marzipan christmas-y things.

the ingredients for a christmas cake are long and strange, and include things like candied lemon peel, candied cherries and black treacle. in the beginning, john refused to believe me that such oddities might be found at the local (gourmet) supermarket, and so he special ordered each and every single one of them from amazon.com for $30. then he got impatient, checked out the supermarket, which lo-and-behold the supplied all of the these ingredients, plus additional necessities such as three different kinds of raisins, plus brandy, drambuie and cointreau. i'm guessing all that added up to about $100.

the first stage of the actual cooking process was to combine all these ingredients and bake the cake. john and ava started this project on thanksgiving weekend.

after that were a couple of weeks of periodically "feeding" the cake more doses of alcohol.

and, finally, yesterday the cake was declared ready for decorating. so, off john went to the supermarket for marzipan. it took four tubes of marzipan to cover the cake, for a total price of $28.

after the marzipan-ing, the cake was iced and then decorated with marzipan trees and snowman (by yours truly). then it got a lovely sprinkling of sparking snow sugar ($5), and finally the $163 christmas cake was complete.

anybody care to buy a $5 slice?

it's very rare that anybody (other than spammers) leaves a comment on ava's blog. however, using the little contact link on the upper right there, a surprising number of readers send ava fan mail. over the years, we've gotten a steady trickle of cute letters once every couple of months. lately, it's picked up to a couple per month.

the letters all describe the same scenario: i found your blog looking on google for xyz, found your blog instead, and gosh, isn't your daughter cute. the most common scenario is "i found your blog searching on google images for 'ladybug' and found [the above] picture"

until recently, this picture was on the first page of results for both google images and bing images. lately it's slid to page two (disappointing!). our latest fan mail really made me laugh though. it was from a very sweet father in germany, who had found ava-the-ladybug while playing the google giggles with his eighteen month daughter. apparently his daughter like the picture of ava so much that they had to go back and revisit it once a day for two weeks!

grandma came down to san francisco for a short visit and to pick up ava and take her home to the great white north! before they left, they made some beautiful stain glass cookie ornaments for our christmas tree.