The Swearingen Family: January 2013

Our baby girl is 16 months old today. After a busy Holiday Season, it has been a welcoming break to have a relaxing couple of weekends at home! This weekend has been warm and sunny and we have been enjoying the time outside taking walks in the stroller and wagon and playing on Ava's new slide that Uncle Chace bought her for Christmas. I am still a little nervous about her playing on it because I feel like she is going to go face down the slide but she always manages to turn herself around and go down feet first.

The weather is a welcoming change from last weekend were we woke up with flash flood warnings Sunday morning and shortly after waking up, discovered that we had a leak in the top of our window frame in Ava's playroom. After a couple of hours a large water mark developed on the ceiling and we discovered where the source of the leak was coming from for the window. The roof above the playroom is a flat roof with a deck on top of it which makes it impossible to find the exact source of the leak. We are waiting on an estimate to come back and it looks like we are going to have to replace it. We are just hoping that some how it is hail or wind related so insurance will cover it, otherwise it is going to put a big damper on the start of the New Year for us.

Ava's favorite word now is oh oh and she says this at least a hundred times a day. She is great at waving bye bye and is now able to fully run around the house. She enjoys rocking in her rocking chair in her room and is going through a phase where she is throwing her toys. We are trying to teach her not to do this by putting her toys in time out when she does this. I put on Just Dance for the Wii the other night and just as I thought, she enjoyed dancing along and we spent an hour dancing.

Ava is a constant joy in our life and is a reminder to us daily on the blessings that we receive from above.

What a fantastic Holiday Season we had this year! We had a fun and busy December that we kicked off the Tuesday after Thanksgiving with The Lighting of the Green at David Lipscomb. This is a great community event that is hosted a block from our home at Lipscomb University. The students are dressed up like characters from Charles Dickens books and they have hot chocolate and cookies that they pass out. They offer free photos with Santa and a concert that leads up to them turning on the campus Christmas lights. Ava had her first picture with Santa here last year but this year we arrived too late and the line was longer than we wanted to wait in.

The first weekend in December we went to see the lights at The Opryland Hotel along with the rest of Tennessee. While the hotel was quite crowded, we found a special area for children tucked away in the back of the hotel in a ballroom that was not crowded. This was a special Christmas area for kids that had an area of games, story time with Mrs. Claus, pictures with Santa, a candy land, and small train that Ava rode for her first train ride. It was a great little area and we had fun and was happy to be away from the crowds.

The following weekend we went to Cheekwood which had Santa Saturday's every weekend in December. After seeing the long line at Lipscomb we had planned on arriving at Cheekwood right as they opened to hopefully avoid a long line for Santa. We ended up not getting there right when they opened and by the time we got to the line, there was a two hour wait. Ava was already dressed to see Santa and Travis had not gone to play basketball this morning so we decided to wait it and out took turns standing in line while the other one walked Ava around. Cheekwood did a wonderful job and had reindeers, cookie decorating, story telling, and stations set up to make snow globes and ornaments. We had not planned on being at Cheekwood this long and did not bring any lunch for Ava, so we visited the cookie decorating twice to get her a snack until we made it home. Surprisingly Ava was a trooper and did not fuss at all while we waiting. It was not until we finished taking our family photo with Santa and then placed Ava on Santa's lap that Ava decided that she had enough and started crying her eyes out.

We tried to be mindful of Ava this year when we decorated the house for Christmas and only put ornaments on the top half of the tree. Ava did not have much interest in our tree this year and only touched it a couple of times. Now that Ava is in the toddler classroom at school, we often receive drawings and such that she has made. We received the best gifts from her in December and one of the gifts was a wrapped present that said to: Mommy and Daddy love, Ava. You have to imagine how my heart skipped a beat when I saw this. Inside was a felt ornament with her picture on it. The second gift that we received was her footprint made into a snowman. These are the best gifts and we will cherish them forever.

We continued our Christmas traditions with Aunt Alissa and I making our 3rd Annual Christmas wreath at Cheekwood. We also attend the Nashville Symphony's Christmas concert for the fourth year in a row with Nanny, Aunt Alissa, and Aunt Mandy. We are also starting a new tradition with the Elf on the Shelf which is a Christmas Elf that visits Ava each day and reports to Santa each night. She is too young to understand this now, but I look forward to her understanding this concept in the future.

The weekend of the 20th kicked off our Christmas week long celebration with first spending the evening with Nana, Papa, Aunt Alissa, and Nanny. We had a nice dinner followed by opening gifts and visiting. Ava had to go to bed half way through opening her presents so she had to finish up the next morning. On Saturday we drove to East Tennessee to spend time with Mimi, Uncle Chace, and Aunt Mandy. Aunt Mandy received a diamond engagement ring this day and Ava was happy to learn that she would be getting another Uncle!

Christmas Eve we went up to Abingdon for brunch with Aunt Janet and Uncle Dickie, and in true Janet style, she cooked a wonderful Southern meal for us. We went to candlelight Christmas Eve service and it was the first church service that Ava attended. We were smart enough to sit on an aisle seat in the back and we had to step out with her several times so that she was not that child who wined during the service. Christmas day Ava woke up not feeling well and again, we had to put her down half way during opening her gifts.

The day after Christmas, Travis and I drove back to Nashville and left Ava in Kingsport until the 1st. We wanted to come home so we could start working on Ava's Christmas gift from us which was converting our office into her playroom! We first had to move all of our office furniture upstairs which Travis mainly did. We then painted her playroom and I started decorating it with everything that I had been purchasing over the last month. My father and step-mother came in the Sunday before New Year's and he was helpful in putting together her kitchen set, playhouse, and bookcase. By the time Ava arrived home, her playroom was set and ready for her to go. She immediately went to the kitchen set and ran in and out of her playhouse saying peek boo!

Ava turned 15 months old December which meant it was time for her pediatricians appointment and her next round of shots. She weighed in at 24.3 pounds which is in the 75th percentile and she is 32 inches tall which is the 90th percentile, she definitely is a Swearingen!

I went to pick Ava up early from school one day last week and peeked in her classroom to see all of the children sitting at the table having their afternoon snack. All of the children were being so good eating their snack and as they finished they got up from the table, threw away their napkin, put their juice cup on the counter, and then stood in line for the teacher to wash their hands. It was the most amazing thing I have every seen in my life and I commented to the teacher that Ava had been putting her juice cup up on our counter at home and now I see where she learned this from. I am so pleased with Ava's daycare and you can tell that Ava learns a lot of songs at school because she is always singing and dancing around the house. You cannot make out most of what she is saying but she does say more, milk, cat, peek boo, and oh oh. She loves to mimic anything that we do down to fake sneezing after her Mimi sneezed. Her walk sometimes has a little skip to it and she is now running around the house. She still loves her story time and could stay in the bath tub for hours if we let her. She gives kisses when she wants to and has the best laugh. She continues to be a joy in our life and we always look forward to what she does and learns each day.