Urban cowgirls

Our vet had a 25 yr. celebration in his parking lot w/food and farm animals.

The pygmy goats elicited a squeal of delight but the highlight for my pony-loving girl was the horseback ride. This is me and Ava on Little Red.

Getting on was easy with the handler's help. Going over the steeples was a little tougher.

Wild haired al fresco brunch

It's about 75 degrees already today, edging towards a likely 80+, so we opted to have brunch on the patio.
It's too nice of a day to delay the meal just to put a few hairs in place to hang in our own backyard, so we're disregarding my child's extremely wild bed head.
Menu: egg sandwich on toasted whole grain w/a slice of Dubliner Kerrygold cheese, Johnsonville breakfast links (are they publicly traded? Because we should own stock), red and green seedless grapes, Rainier cherries (yes, Ava can get the pit out on her own), and the requisite cup of whole organic milk. Man, is it snack time yet? I'm suddenly hungry again.

Beignet day

About once a year, I indulge my neverending craving for the cinnamon sugar dusted, fried dough concoction known as beignets. Since they have origins in New Orleans French culture, I'm counting their ingestion as a cultural experience for Ava since we're part Creole. C'est très bon!

Shock and awe

Introduced Ava (wearing my sandals) to the concept of eating olives off of her fingertips. By the delighted look of awe on her face you'd think I showed her a shortcut for nuclear fission in our kitchen. Toddlers are way too fun.

Ava plays the name game

At one year and nine months (21 months), having heard many conversations among the adults in her life, my daughter Ava has figured out that grownups have different names, as evidenced by the video.

It's a neat developmental milestone, but a little disconcerting to have this tiny being who seven months ago couldn't even propel her own body across the room unassisted turn to me and say, "Tasha? Tasha? Juice?"

Yeeeaaah... um, no. It's still 'Mommy' to you little bean. Or as Jason put it, "I'm not on a first name basis with 21 month olds."

I have friends whose two year old already follows yes and no with sir or ma'am. We're pretty informal out here on the West Coast so I don't think we'll be going that route with Ava, but I do want her to talk respectfully to adults.

I remember visiting relatives in the south when I was a teen. After answering some question with "Yes," an elder demanded, "Yes what?"

"Indeed?" I suggested, more to be humorously meddlesome than disrespectful.

We'll fine tune the respectful language as Ava begins to use more of it, but in the meantime, I'm just happy she articulates well enunciated and appropriately used yeses and nos (rather than yeah and uh-uh) and that she's figured out if she says "Mommy?" six times in a row and doesn't get my attention, saying "Tasha?" certainly will.