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an unfathomable number of people around the world are hooked on a new(ish) service called twitter, and an equally unfathomable number still have no idea what it is. twitter is . . . a bit hard to explain. one way to think of twitter is as a blog hosting website. however, there is one twist : each entry (called a "tweet") may be no longer than 140 characters. and two unique features, 1) you can send in your blog updates by sending a text message (SMS) to twitter, and 2) your friends can sign up to receive your blog updates on their phones.

ava used to have room in her heart for only one inanimate object . . . good old ducky. now that ducky stays home most of the time, she's branched out a little. but while her interests have expanded, the passion has not diminished. now ava becomes furiously attached to the most random objects imaginable.

it all started with the "ice creams" (bottom left). ava assembled these from two unrelated sets of toys (stacking cups and a magnetic caterpillar) in the bath one day. oh . . . cute . . . clever . . . thought mommy and daddy. yeah, cute and clever right until the point where she refused to ever let go of them, including while she was sleeping. after a few days of that, i confiscated them in the middle of the night. a couple of weeks later, i brought them back for another try. major mistake - once again, i wound up clawing them out of her sleeping hands in the middle of night and spiriting them away (for good!).

she formed another strong attachment to her new cat towel. thankfully, i'm getting smarter, and by the second consecutive hour of wearing it in the house, i started rambling on about how kitty was a house-cat, and couldn't go outside, and blah, blah, blah. this seems to have kept this particular obsession to a manageable level.

by far the weirdest so far is a red nalgene bottle, which she picked up in the van on our trip to point reyes, sang songs to it for an hour in the van . . . and then insisted on snuggling it to sleep . . . twice.

today we took a little family trip up to point reyes. point reyes is a funny shaped peninsula that encloses a large inland bay. it includes small mountains and lush forests, and both ocean and inland bay beaches. predicting the fog patterns at point reyes is about as easy as predicting the fog in our neighborhood (e.g. impossible). this morning, although it was foggy at home, we decided to cross our fingers and hope it would clear by the time we got up there. well . . . not quite . . . it was definitely foggy at the ocean beaches. ava didn't seem to care much, and had a grand old time cooking up soup to feed to her snakes inside her driftwood tee-pee, which frequently needed defending from stick-stealing enemies.

after we'd had our fill of fog, we switched sides of the peninsula to visit heart's desire beach - a very toddler friendly beach on tamales bay. despite the warmth and sunshine, ava still wasn't too sure about the temperature of the water ("too cold!"), but i eventually lured her in. and, eventually, she forgave daddy for invading her foggy fort. full pic gallery here.

having recently read two other blogs touting the oakland zoo, i decided it was time to take a trip across the bay. i organized the aunties, and they organized all the other babies in their lives, and before you know it, we had toddlerfest II!

prior to this expedition, ava thought going to see "the animals" meant going to see a cow or a sheep . . . or if she was really lucky . . . a bunny. lions and tigers and bears hadn't really entered her world yet. i think it would be safe to say that she enjoyed herself immensely, but i might also have to admit that the goats were probably her favorite animal.

my favorite animal was the giraffes. apparently though, i don't take pictures of animals . . . only small children. so, if you choose to peruse the full picture gallery, i apologize for the lack of wildlife. after we got home, i had the following somewhat surprising converation with ava

cailin : what was your favorite animal?
ava : giraffe (liar . . . copycat . . . she liked the goats better . . . we just saw the giraffe's last)
cailin : do you remember the flamingoes?
ava : yeah (yeah . . . right . . . first thing we saw . . )
cailin : what color were the flamingoes?
ava : pink! (i swear, we've never talked about flamingos before . . . hmm . . . )
cailin: what color were the parrots?
ava : blue! (well . . . how 'bout that . . . that they were.)

ava is a little bit silly (insane?) these days . . . she has many conversational and behavioral "tics" that amuse me no end. one of them is her unusual grasp on manners . . . ava can be in the throes of a "no no no!" tantrum, but instead she'll say "no thank you much! no thank you much!" another great one is her reaction to being kissed. she went through a phase where she said "yuck!", but now she says "ow!!". this led to the following conversation today . . .

cailin : [kisses ava on cheek]
ava: ow! ow! poor ava!
cailin : oh, i'm sorry, i didn't mean to hurt you
ava : ow! ow! [clawing at her cheek, trying to rub off the kiss]
cailin : poor ava . . . should i kiss it better?
ava : yeah!
cailin : [kisses ava on cheek]
ava: [contented silence]

i try to keep up with the over abundance of ava pictures, and not blog about past events . . . but occasionally something sneaks by me. in the middle of july, ava spent 10 days in san francisco alone with daddy, while i was in thunder bay. daddy and ava did just fine, but the joys of single fatherhood were definitely a bit of a shock to john's system. fortunately, the aunties stepped in to help out - and they even left behind some documented photo evidence! unfortunately said evidence remained buried somewhere on our computer until today. without further delay, we present a day in july with shannon and arantxa.

grandma got ava a beautiful dollhouse for her second birthday. our original plan for the summer included grandma coming to san francisco shortly after ava's birthday - hence the dollhouse was shipped directly here. since things got rearranged quite a bit, grandma hasn't seen the dollhouse yet.

ava loves it. at first she played with it in a distinctly toddler style - taking all of the dolls, animals and furnishings and piling them into one room of the house or barn. lately though, she seems to "get it". she particularly likes putting the little people on the toilet, and giving anything (animal, vegetable or mineral) a bath. this morning however, she did pull the little foam inserts out of the bed mattresses and rip them into little pieces. (i'm sure she was saying "make pieces! make pieces!" the whole time, and i was merrily ignoring her.)

ava started preschool on september 2nd, and so far, she's been doing great. by far the saddest side effect of this next step in her evolution is that she no longer gets to see paulo everyday! ava misses him, and i do too, so i've taken to showing up at his doorstep and demanding that his parents hand him over for a playdate (alright, alright, i do call them about 10 minutes beforehand).

hanging out with ava and paulo is getting really fun. they now understand the concept of an "activity" and can actually work together for brief periods of time. our last playdate was action packed. we had the educational period (letter puzzles), the arts and craft period (painting, followed by puff ball and glitter glueing), a brief rendition of the old "crash in the beanbag favorite" followed by dinner, a bath and "a movie".

many, many things cracked me up during their "date". a few remain in my mind. first, they insisted that we clean up between puzzles and crafts. second, paulo glued his glittery bits to the page by spreading out a bunch of glue and then dumping the entire container on to the paper (this has never occurred to ava, who loves the repetition of doing them one by one). third, paulo has alot more enthusiasm for transitions than ava. there was a brief pause between dinner and desert, during which ava wandered off to play in the living room. when desert was announced, paulo got the message immediately . . . realized ava was not with the program . . . and started running back and forth between ava and the table "ava! ava! desert's ready! ava get up! ava desert! ava! ava!"

more bath pics

while in thunder bay, ava sat at the table in an antique high chair. this particular chair is probably around 200 years old - constructed eons before the advent of infant safety standards. it's incredibly tippy and has no tray or restraints whatsoever. but . . . it happened to be just ava's size this trip, she could climb in and out on her own, and she refused to sit in anything else.

mommy's no dummy, and i suspected this might have some influence on her seating choice back in california. fortunately her chair back home converts into a booster chair (no tray or buckles) and i planned to have john get around to it very very soon. we didn't get around to it our first evening back though, and it was with much trepidation that i picked her up and lowered her into her highchair for lunch the day after we returned. to my surprise . . . no fuss. ate her lunch . . . all was well . . . and then . . . she tried to get out. code red meltdown. after extracting her from the highchair (no small trick when she's kicking, flailing and arching her back) the meltdown continued until i caved in, went down to the garage and pawed through john's biking gear until i located the magic allen key and dismantled the "baby parts" on the spot

so, ava now sits up like a big girl at the grownup table. it doesn't seemed to have stopped her from shoving most food into her mouth as fast as humanly possible.