imagination

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.

after ava came home from thunder bay, she and grandma spent a week doing their usual thing in san francisco. this picture that grandma took illustrates one of my favourite new ava features : she pretends things. here, she is pretending to feed the turtle.

her pretend sessions frequently involve food. one of the earliest that we noticed was in mid-august. ava was sitting in her car seat in the back of the car, pretending to eat potato chips out of a crinkly plastic bag. this was a little baffling as a) we've never fed her potato chips and b) we've very rarely given her any food out of a bag (until recently, this was beyond her co-ordination).