Happy Halloween!

Having a baby gives Halloween (and every other major holiday) a whole new meaning. I'm excited to see my daughter enjoy holidays the way I did as a child- the way I haven't been able to enjoy them for a long time.

I'm pretty excited to carve that pumpkin.

My dad was disappointed that we're not dressing her up as something scary. How could you possibly make a cute chubby baby scary?

Aven would like to wish everyone a Happy Halloween. Eat lots of candy on her behalf :)

Like Father like Daughter.

Aven's only 5 months old and she's already playing with computer hardware. You can see in her face that's she's trying to figure out how it works so she can put it back together and install Ubuntu on it. I swear that's what's happening and it's not that it's just a new shiny thing, that spins.

To the non computer geeks out there, that's a hard drive without the case that she's playing with.

Soothing the Savage Beast

A couple weekends ago Aven was resisting a nap with all her might and was extremely cranky, so we got in the car. We started driving and she was asleep by the time we got to the freeway on ramp. We drove up Lamb's Canyon and it was breathtaking. Rain at the bottom and by the time we reached the top of the canyon it was snowing and about 30 degrees outside. What a nice relaxing experience after a very stressful day.

Our First President was a Gangsta

I just love the little things my students add to my books in class. He looks so much more like a man of the people in that hat.

Ridiculous Inspiration

The last sentence of an e-mail from my principal was "Please remember- we cannot afford any buts." meaning "we can't afford to make excuses" and this was the first thing I thought of- there may be something wrong with me.

A Girl's Best Friend

Eye contact. Aven is very interested in Grace and is always entertained when she plays with my mom's dogs.

Eskimo kisses that turned into licks right on the mouth- yuck.

Just a super-cute picture of our beautiful girl.

A Delicious Snack

Aven has recently discovered how delicious her feet are.
Our pediatrician said that she's ahead of schedule on this developmental milestone. Hello Harvard!

My friend Amber recently lent us her son's bouncer, which Aven is quickly learning to love and which takes up almost as much space as our dining room table. We may get to eat an entire meal without interruption sometime in the near future.

More Aven

Just posting a couple photos from the past week.


Here's an attempted family photo at the Cabin, Grace wouldn't cooperate though she wanted to find the squirrels.

Here's Aven in here cute striped suit as seen in the last photo Cara posted



Here's Aven playing with her rings, they are easy to grab so she loves them.

We Missed It

Aven in the front carrier on a recent trip to Flaming Gorge

We did not have a very good night last night. Aven woke up every 1 1/2 to 2 hours. The only thing we could do to get her back to sleep was to bring her into our bed. Not something I want to get in the habit of doing, but when you have to wake up at 5 am to go to work you'll do just about anything to get back to sleep.

When I got up I looked up 'sleep problems in four month old babies' online and read all about 'sleep regression'. I guess when babies are working on a developmental milestone their little bodies and brains are working so hard that their sleep patterns are often disturbed. The article also mentioned that the sleep disturbances can go on for a few days all the way up to several weeks. Great.

So, when I picked her up at daycare her super-sweet caregiver, Robin, asked me if she had done any rolling over yet. She hasn't even hinted at rolling over so I was surprised by this question. Robin told me that Aven rolled over twice today. Major developmental milestone achieved! It was very bitter sweet: She rolled over- yay! She rolled over and I missed it :( So, tonight she'll be spending a lot of time laying on a blanket in the middle of the living room while intently watch her and wait for my own magical rolling over moment.

Can we get some sleep now?

My Desktop at Work

I came in to work today after my nice long 4 day weekend and smiled as my computer booted up and showed my kick ass desktop. I love this desktop, The wall paper is from Jason Chan and the bar along the bottom of the screen is my cool custom task bar, it has all the programs I use on a regular bases shown as cool black icons that I can click on to open them up. Anyway my work desktop is something that makes me happy, and I wanted to share it with you.