thunder-bay

ava just returned from a wonderful month of august spent in thunder bay with grandma. what did they do? they . . .

watched the grass and flowers grow

played in ava's garden house

flew on a very tiny plane to sault ste marie, and then took a train through agawa canyon

decorated ava's chair

spent hours playing with the leftover bits from grandma's not quite finished back deck remodel

picked hundreds of flowers from grandma's gardens

discovered that ava loves smoked whitefish

went blueberry picking

hosted parties

went potty

visited many of the great local playgrounds

had a bonfire

roasted marshmallows

snuggled up in ava's canopy bed

grew, harvested and processed many types of vegetables

chased the kitties

ava's visit with grandma overlapped with lucy's visit with her grandma, so ava had a chance to go hang out with lucy and the post family at their cottage on lake superior. ava and lucy last hung out in ottawa in may. they were pretty cute then, but according to witnesses they hit it off especially well this time around. and although i missed the visit, it was beautifully documented in photos by joan.

although the old nature versus nurture issue complicates the analysis, i'm starting to suspect that these two little ones may share some similarity in spirit. for exaple, they are both big fans of the show "little bear" and when they started talking immediately started incorporating phrases and concepts from this show into their speech. of course, "ava" sent lucy the little bear dvds to begin with, so this parallel evolution is none too surprising. odder though, is that their mutual favorite character is a rather strange and minor character : a snake called "no feet".

while they were visiting, ava taught lucy how to "fish". they both enjoyed this activity alot, and lucy kept it up after ava's departure.

in return lucy passed on to ava her "chippy" feeding skills, and by the time she left ava had chippy eating right out of ther hand!

on august 6th, ava and grandma flew back to thunder bay. just in time for their arrival, an unusually cold and rainy summer finally perked up a bit. and grandma sent me some unusually nice ava pictures, so i thought i'd share a few here.

the theme of the trip so far seems to be flowers. since ava now sleeps in a "big girl bed", she's graduated to "mommy's room" at grandma's house. my old bed has been re-equipped with it's canopy, and freshened up with a new flowery woodland quilt.

ava had some prep on flower arranging at her birthday party, but it must be twice as fun at grandmas. at grandma's she gets to start out by picking out her own flowers, right from the garden!

in this picture ava is wearing her red slippers, which she started "packing" for thunder bay a good month before it was actually time to leave. she wore them to the airport once to catch a very early morning flight, and she is now convinced that they are essential part of the travel experience.

here ava models her new "polka dot spinning dress". the "waistband" on her current favorite is dangerously close to reaching her armpits, so it's time for the next generation! apparently polka-dots still trumps pink.

grandpa was an integral part of ava's first ice cream experience, so i thought he might like to come along for another great first . . . mcdonald's!

okay, so, if you grew up in say . . . thunder bay . . . then mcdonalds sounds like a weird thing to get excited about and a weird thing to not do until you are two years and ten months old. but (again, kinda like the ice cream shop) we don't really have very many of them around here. to my knowledge there are no mcdonalds in san francisco, other than a couple of really sleazy ones downtown. (strangely, our neighborhood does have a miniature burger king . . . but that's a whole different story.)

since it was ava's first mcdonalds experience, i wanted to make sure it was a fun one. we took her to a mcdonalds with a gigantic plastic playground inside. ava was quite pleased with the whole experience. she declared "this is a wonderful table. it has dots like my dice". and, she ate her french fries and chicken nuggets (couldn't convince her to try the dipping sauce though). and, surprisingly, she really enjoyed the playground. the playground was a bit more than i was anticipating - consisting mostly of a fast maze of plastic tunnels that the children climb up inside and then slide down. the catch is - you can't see the kids anywhere inside this maze - and adults aren't allowed to go in. after a good ten minutes of watching the other kids disappear inside the tunnel, ava actually decided to give it a whirl too. (and of course, didn't want to stop after that!)

the stars of the show at grandma's house this visit were ava's new kitties : poppy and tuck. sadly, my beloved nineteen-year-old cat skimble passed away this past december. ava and skimble were great buddies, and to dull ava's sadness at skimble's departure, grandma promised ava she would get a new kitty in the spring.

around february, grandma started scouring the city for the perfect litter of kitties, and in april she found them. grandma opted to adopt two sibling kittens. poppy is the female kitty, and appears to be skimble reincarnated - both physically and in her gentle disposition. tuck is the male, and is actually just as sweet with grandma and myself, but is somewhat less tolerant of being abused loved by ava.

ava spent hours chasing and capturing the kitties, and then dragging them around - ever so "gently". i kept wondering how long it would take her to think about dressing them up in dolls clothes, and on day #19 of her visit she finally did. true to their personalities, poppy put up with it without a struggle. tuck - not so much.

more kitty pics.

on may 19th, ava headed up to canada for a three week visit with "gramma!". when grandma arrived to pick ava up in san francisco, john and i became instantly uncool. for the two days before ava's depareture we mostly heard "go away mommy/daddy!" and had lots of doors slammed in our faces. thankfully, we're not very sensitive.

ava and grandma had a lovely visit. ava spent many happy hours fishing in the creek (with a real bamboo fishing pole), visiting local farms, festivals and making "chocolate horse cake".

according to grandma, ava spent the first week wearing whatever clothes grandma picked out before reverting to her ongoing obsession with dresses and "tights with feet at the bottom".

more grandma and ava pics.

recipe for chocolate horse cake: start with one large plastic green tub. add one brown plastic horse, two miniature fuzzy chickens, and assorted mcdonalds happy meal toys from 1982. stir lots and bake in the sun.

today ava and i returned from a lovely trip to ottawa to visit my best friends from thunder bay, jill, joan and edith, and their kids izze, lucy and mr.-xy (due mid-june). ava and i flew to ottawa on the red-eye . . . which in retrospect wasn't my best plan. i failed to take into account the fact that ava likes airplanes and therefore was too excited to go to sleep for the first 2.5 hours of our 5.5 hour over-night flight. she finally nodded off at 3:30 AM EST, and was able to sleep until about 5:45 AM PST when our plane landed. our next flight was only one hour long - too short for her to settle down and go back to sleep.

nonetheless - she did great that first day! every time she sat down in her stroller or a car seat, her eyes would glaze over and she'd look sort of semi-comatose. once back on her feet again though, she was really pretty pleasant and got right into the groove of hanging out with her little buddies.

when last ava, izze and lucy got to hang out, izze and lucy were still pre-walkers and ava was walking and talking, so they were really in the same "world" so to speak. it was really cute watching them interact in much more meaningful ways. their favorite group activities included puddle stomping, jumping up and down with balloons while squealing loudly, endless fascination with a set of dominoes and gleefully shoving their little dining table back and forth at each other. ava also enjoyed picking the flowers that grew in edith and craig's lawn and hanging out with craig - seemingly her new favorite person on the planet. i predict a bright future for craig as a daddy!

while we were there we had a baby shower for edith, introduced ava to her canadian heritage at parliament hill and saw millions of pretty tulips. picture gallery here.

john and i returned to san francisco on new year's eve - but ava stayed in thunder bay with grandma until january 8th. they had lots of fun in the snow, including a outdoor new year's eve party at -25C! grandma also took ava out for a daily skating lesson. understandably, grandma was too busy making sure ava didn't fall on her face to take any "action shots", but i think this one of ava in her equipment is pretty cute. the helmet actually came with a full hockey mask over the face - ava wasn't too enthused about that idea, but with that removed she was all set to go!

today we had what will probably be our last visit with "baby izze". not because we're planning on disowning her as a friend - but because we caught her in those very last few weeks of being a "baby". izze is 13.5 months younger than ava, and i enjoyed observing the similarity between izze now and ava last year. much like ava2007, izze's snowboots seemed to go halfway up her leg, she looked like a big puffy marshmellow in her snowsuit and snow was definitely not her favorite thing. all in all though, i'd say she was better adjusted than ava was last year. see the full thunder bay christmas album.

as john noted the other day, pretty much the only thing ava does NOT say "no!" to is "ava, go kiss the [whatever]". a useful feature for cute pictures. see the full thunder bay christmas album.