Recap and Zoo Trip

I lost my camera.

Many of you know this already, and some of you may not believe me, as it does sound a bit like "My dog ate my homework." But it really is true: I have found that there exists in our tiny little house, a black hole of sorts. When things go missing, they go to this black hole. And I never find them again. My consolation is that whenever we move from this house, I will find the camera. Likely I will have already bought a new one, but hey, then we'll have two nice, new cameras.

Anyway, the summer has flown past and now it's August. We're heading into another "school year," Stephen's first not being in school. He is, as I was, very much looking forward to being able to cherish the feeling of watching and knowing others are going to and from class, while he is gloriously not. Though I foreshadow for him that this will last a while and then part of him will actually a tiny bit miss classes. A little.

Ava will be 15 months old this Friday and has another doctor's appointment that day as well. She's walking all over and getting into everything, which has recently led us to begin "timeout:" one minute on the bottom step of the stairs. She's also starting to learn some new words: we're working on "up," "down," "done," "out," "in," lots of prepositions. So far they haven't quite taken...but the grunts are starting to sound a little bit more like words everyday. She has some words mastered: "mama," "dada," "nana," (which corresponds both to bananas and Nana) "pa" (for grandpa), and our personal favorite: Bah! for bye. Our little Southern Belle. We're hoping she'll pick up the words quickly, since at times she seems extremely frustrated at not being able to express herself very well and so proud of herself when praised for the words she can say.

Currently Ava is teething again, but this time seems much worse as it appears that the rest of her teeth, including molars, are all coming in at once. So we're in the thick of it right now and hopefully we'll be all done in another two weeks or so. Stephen and I had dentist appointments ourselves about two weeks ago and the dentist took a quick look at Ava's teeth while we were there. Of course, this scared Ava incredibly, so I'm not looking forward to her first official dentist appointment next month.

Yesterday Stephen, Ava and I went to the zoo with the Frain family: Alex, Beth and John. The Naples zoo is free the first Saturday of the month to Collier County residents, and we've been told that this is the only way to go to this zoo. So we went to check it out. Certainly not the most impressive zoo, but it was a good outing for the little ones. Here are some pictures:

Here are the babies ready to go!

A couple family shots:

Ava and the ducklings: Ava's version of a duck quacking: "Guack, guack!"

Stephen and Ava, Alex and John!