Saturday, June 12, 2010

Ava is 3-months and So Smiley!

We're having fun and she's becoming more mobile and strong every day! This picture with Bena is from when we watched a movie tonight. Ava started rolling to her side several weeks ago and now she's able to roll and go to her back, which she does repeatedly. And doing this rolling, she's able to get herself around in a circle! I took this picture and then a while later, she was almost in a complete circle from rolling. It was so fun to watch her new-found mobility.

My friend Valeri, visited us last weekend and you can see in this picture, she's holding her up on the counter and Ava is strong enough to hold herself upright with a little help.

Here's some highlights of what's happening as Ava turns 3-months.

Smiling so much! Ava has been "social smiling" since she was about 8 weeks old, but now she's so energetic with smiling. She loves to smile first thing in the morning. She wakes up in a good mood and happy.

More social interactions. Part of the fun is that Ava is now able to see farther away and can respond to our voices when we enter the room. She smiles at us from a distance now. And she's socializing a lot at daycare with the other babies. Check out the post when Ava was the Indy 500 Queen at her daycare.

Lots of family time: Ava and I spent time up at the lake house visiting her grandparents. We had a relaxing visit and she got lots of time with family and friends. Here's a picture of Ava snoozing with her great-grandma Berkey. Grandma Berkey told me that holding Ava reminded her of holding her babies all those years ago. So sweet! This week, Aaron's mom and her best friend, Deb, visited us for a couple days. Deb danced with Ava and Grandma gave her a bath. They both enjoyed keeping her home for the morning while we were at work.

Sleeping through the night....Ah! I'm loving the longer blocks of sleep! Oh how I missed sleeping. On most nights, Ava goes to sleep around 10pm and wakes up around 5am or later! That's huge! It does mean that she nurses a TON before she goes to sleep to store up for the night. A couple of nights, I've had to wake up to pump because my body is still getting used to her sleeping so long at night. We still have Ava in our room at night in the co-sleeper, which is next to my side of the bed. I can reach out to her to pull in bed with us to nurse or just hold her hand. We think that she'll move into her room later this summer or early Fall. I wanted her to be close to me since I'm back at work and it's working great! She is great about falling asleep at night in her bed.

Our next big project - Ava's nursery! Since we're planning on moving Ava to her room in the next couple months, so that's my next project. Since we moved to our house just before her birth and planned to have Ava in our room, it wasn't a priority. But it's time now. We painted the walls a light gray and the the theme is butterflies and I'm using hot pink for accent. We were planning monkeys, but it's really hard to find monkeys to match our pink theme. It seems all the monkeys are for boys! I have a white paper lantern that we'll hang above her crib and I'm going to glue hot pink butterflies to it. I'll post pictures when it's done!

My work transition schedule is over. I'm now working in the office 3 days per week. I'm ready to be in the office more, but working from 2 days at week is wonderful because I don't have the crazy long hours apart from Ava! We're apart for 10 hrs when I'm in the office, but only 4 1/2 when she goes to daycare for a half-day when I'm working at home. I love that schedule. I saw my CEO this week in the hallway and I thought it was so touching because he asked me how the working-mom juggling is going. It made me SO good that I work for a company where the leadership is human and cares. I have been so happy and grateful to have a flexible work schedule and I can see it truly is embraced from the very top! When I'm at work, I'm trying to be laser-focused so I can be efficient in those hours and get home to spend our precious family time.

We have a busy summer in store so I'll keep you updated with our adventures!

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