Update

Ava and her friend Blaine playing.

Ava and Blaine sitting in a chair. They are only 6 days apart. We like to joke that they are going to be married some day! They are so cute together!

Ava is almost 15 months old and she is getting smarter every day!

She can say: Hi, nana (banana), baba (drink), bow wow (dog, horse, or basically anything with 4 legs, while pointing at it), and uh-oh! She is pretty good at communicating what she wants. She is really good at pointing and making gestures until she gets what she wants. She loves to read her books and talk on the phone. Right now she loves to climb on things. Once she gets on top of something she stands up so tall like she is so proud of herself! Another things he likes to do dance. She puts her hands above her head and twirls around like a ballerina. She absolutely loves to talk on the phone! She will put anything small up against her ear and talk. She says "hi" and then jabbers and then she will start laughing for no reason. It's pretty entertaining to watch.

In other news, we are moving to Payson to live in my parent's basement. We are excited to have some more room to ourselves. Blake has 2 treatments left (we hope) and then possible radiation. We are hoping to be completely done with treatment by July. His tumor has shrunk by 50% which is wonderful news! Unfortunately we are going to have to pay for everything on our own. We have done everything we can to try and get help from insurance and the state and it looks like we are on our own. We are going to have a huge yard sale at the end of June so if you have anything you would like to donate towards paying off our bills that would be wonderful! I will post more info later when I know more.

Chocolate cake

Grandma Tuckett made some chocolate cake one Sunday and we decided to give Ava some because she never had the chance to eat chocolate cake on her own. Since she had bandaged hands on her birthday.

As you can see she loved it!

The bib she is wearing is Blake's. I really like it because it covers everything and keeps her really clean. Can you see her pig tails? I was finally able to do that to her and I think she looks so cute!

Ava's 1st birthday!

Eating cake as well as she can without hands.

I had to cover her bandaged hands with socks so that I didn't have to change her bandages again.

She loved her chocolate cake!

This is Ava and her cousing Danica. We had a little party with a few family members. She got a couple of outfits, a baby doll and some money. She had a good birthday, she was a little confused by what was going on but that's ok!

February

Ava is a professional walker! As soon as we moved in she started taking off walking. She doesn't even want to crawl any more. She was really sick in the beginning of December. She had croup and bronchiolitis. It was so sad to see her suffer.
Since she is such a good walker here's a good story for you...when I was over at my mom's house, I was cutting my brother's hair and so she took her down stairs to keep her our of the hair on the floor and to keep her from hanging all over me. After I was done with the hair cut, I started sweeping and I heard screaming coming from down stairs. So I run down to see what happened. My mom was holding her and said "she touched the fire place and burned her hands". I saw these huge blisters on the palms of her hands and my mom said to call the doctor because they look pretty bad. We go the doctor's office and they make us wait for about 30 minutes before one of the nurses comes in to give her medicine. Then about 15 minutes later he comes in. She was screaming the whole time! I felt so bad. He said that they look pretty bad and he wanted me to come in on Monday (this was Friday at the time) and cut off the dead skin. So he bandaged her up and sent us on our way. He said that it looked like 2nd degree but he wouldn't know until he saw the skin underneath.
The next week we go in and he cuts off the dead skin and he cried the whole time. It was so sad. He said that if she touched the fireplace a second longer than it would have been 3rd degree. We were so relieved that it wasn't worse than that. We have to change her bandages every day, and she still hates it. She cries and whines the whole time. I feel bad every time that I have to change them. Here is a picture of her below, you can see her bandaged hands.

You can't tell in the picture, but her right hand has her 4 fingers sticking out. They weren't burned as bad and so they healed super fast. That has helped out tremendously with her every activities of getting into everything. She can actually grab things and use her fingers. Her left hand was much worse than the right and so it's still bandaged up. We go the doctor again tomorrow for Ava's 12 month appt and so we are hoping that one of her bandages will be taken off and that her fingers on her left hand will be able to come out.

Can you believe that she is a year old? I can't believe it! She has grown up so much! She is having a party tomorrow and I will definately post some pictures of that.

January

Ava loves bath time! Here are some pictures for your enjoyment because she is so stinkin' cute!

On January 15th, we moved from our home in Palmyra into Blake's parents house in Spanish Fork. He started his treatment in the beginning of January and so he quit working for a few months during that time. He gets treatments every other week and so during the week that he gets treatment he feels pretty sick. His main side effects are fatigue, nausea, vomiting, and a metallic taste in his mouth. On the off week he feels pretty good, just tired.

December

In December we met with the oncologist. Our first visit with him was about 2 hrs. They talked to us about treatment, what the side affects will be and what to expect. They wanted to get a bone marrow biopsy to make sure it hasn't spread and they got an x-ray of his abdomen to make sure that it hasn't spread to other parts of his body. Luckily, his bone marrow is cancer free and his abdomen is also cancer free. So that still put him in Stage 2.

We felt like our world was turned upside down. At first we were very bitter and upset about the whole thing. Mostly I was, Blake was handling it better than I was. Then we felt like "why me?". Then after a looong time I started to finally accept it. They wanted to start the chemo after the holidays so that he would be feeling good.

Ava was 10 months old on Christmas. She took her first steps by herself on Dec. 17! She would only walk when no one was looking and when she didn't realize that she was doing it by herself. When one of us would say for her to walk to us, she would go down to the ground and crawl. What a silly girl. Sorry, no pictures this month. I was lame, and didn't feel like doing anything the whole month. It's a miracle I even got my family anything for Christmas, but just because life sucks doesn't mean that I shouldn't have my family be happy.

November

Ava is 9 months old and she is trying to walk, she will walk along furniture but can't get the courage to walk by herself.

November was the start of the reason why I have not been blogging. In July Blake felt a lump in his neck, he thought it was a swollen gland or an infection or something and so he thought it would go away. He also had a cough and noticed that when the cough would go away so would the lump, but then the lump would come back when the cough came back. He didn't have health insurance at the time so he didn't want to go and have it be nothing. I kept bugging him about it and telling him to go to the doctor and every time I would ask him about it he would say "well, the lump isn't as big anymore".

In November, he came home from work one day and was just not feeling well, so he he finally decided to go the doctor. He said he was tired of feeling sick and tired. The doc wanted him to get some x-rays. Then when we got the results of the x-rays the doc said that something didn't look normal and so he wanted him to get a CT scan, so we waited over the weekend and on Monday he went in to get a CT scan. On Tues, we met with a pulmonologist (lung doc) to get the results. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving he was told that he had Lymphoma. He has a tumor in one of his lymph nodes in his chest and his neck. They wanted a biopsy to determine what type of lymphoma it is. We waited unil the next week to get the biopsy, we found out a few days later that it is Hodgkin Lymphoma, which is the malignant kind and that it was stage 2 cancer. The size of the tumor in his chest was 16cm! We couldn't believe how big it was! They didn't know it was that big until they went in for the biopsy. They said that treatment is chemo and radiation. His symptoms were: night sweats, weight loss, cough, and swollen lymph nodes in the neck. Who would have known?

I know...

It has been an extremely long time since I have written and I have been going through a lot lately so that's been the main reason why I haven't written in a while. This is going to be a long post just so that you have been warned...

Ava was a tiger for halloween. I think she was the cutest tiger ever!

Picture overload!

Here are the pictures that I promised!

This is Ava with a milk mustache. She wanted to hold the camera.

This is her before coming over to me to steal the camera. She has the intent in her eyes!

This is what she has been doing constantly for the past week. Standing up next to furniture.

Huh? Such big beautiful blue eyes!

We call this the "wounded" picture. This is what happens when your kid is learning to walk. I feel like everyone thinks we beat her or something...

Daddy loves his baby girl!

This is a bad quality because it was taken from my phone. We thought this hat looked adorable! She wore this on Sunday and got so many compliments. Her Grammy Connie made this for her and she was finally able to wear it!

This is just plain funny. We think she just gave us a cheesy grin to humor us. Do you like her little fohawk?

Big mouth grin!

Another big mouth grin!

8 months!

Ava is 8 months old and she is getting into everything! She loves to pull herself up to furniture and stand. That's pretty much all that she wants to do when she plays. No matter where she is, she always reaches toward the coffee table or the couch so that she can stand up.
She weighs 17 lbs and 6 oz. and is about 27 inches long. She is still a skinny little thing. We bought her some pants for the colder weather and they are size 6-9 months and when she is wearing them she crawls right out of them! It's so funny! The length is normal, it's just that she is so dang skinny! She has started crawling, but she still prefers to do her army crawl. She has two new teeth! We are so glad they are finally here. She would be kind of crabby when she was cutting her teeth. I'll add pictures later, I'm not able to get them on my computer from my phone right now, maybe I'll do that tomorrow...

7 Months!

Ava is 7 months old! She is so much fun to watch and play with. I'm not sure how much she weighs or how long she is but here are her accomplishments:

• Gets up on her hands and knees
• Scoots all over the place
• Babbles
• Likes to hear her voice and likes to scream when she is excited
• Leans toward a person when she wants them to hold her
• Likes to wave (don't know if she knows that she is waving but we think she is)

We call this picture the "Big Girl!" picture. It shows how big she is getting.

Right after this picture she fell over. I guess babies tend to do that when they look up at something when they are sitting up.

Another "Big Girl" picture

We call this picture "The little lady" picture because she just looks so ladylike and innocent.

6 Months!

I can't believe that Ava is already 6 months old! Here are some things that she has accomplished over the last month. Also, here are her statistics from her last doctors appointment:

-Weight: 15 lbs. 4 oz. (25th %tile)
-Length: 26.5 inches (72nd %tile)
-Head Circumrence: 17 inches (67 %tile)
-Tries to get up on her hands and knees
-Scoots all over the place
-Recognizes mommy and daddy in a crowded room
-Loves to play and laugh
-Likes to sing
-Sits up a lot better
-Holds her bottle all by herself. (which is really nice!)

This is her reaction to seeing herself in front of the mirror.

I snuck in her bedroom to see what she was doing and this was the position that I saw her in. She's so funny! She must have been really tired because the stairs to her room are really sqweaky and everytime I go up there she wakes up. But this time didn't.

This is her concentration face.

We had her pictures taken on Labor Day and when we get them then I will post them on there.
Ava is growing up so fast and we love her so much! She is very curious and into everything that she can get her hands on!

New Job

In a few posts back I mentioned that I had finally finished school. I have still been working at Install Pro a few days a week. I have just been doing hair out of my home and trying to save the money to get all of my salon supplies. Well, last Monday a girl from my school that I graduated with called me and asked me if I was looking for a job. I explained that I wasn't really looking for one exclusively but I just wanted to work maybe one or 2 days during the week. She said that the salon that she is working in just opened up and she has been super busy and the owner was looking for a dependable and hardworking stylist to work only a few days a week. So I called her that same day and talked a bit about when I would be working. I had an interview with her that afternoon and by Friday she said that I had the job. I will be working at 56 West Boutique and Salon. It is located in Spanish Fork, in a pretty good location. I will be working on Friday and Saturdays from 10 am to 6 pm. I am excited to start this new career and be able to actually make money for what I love to do! Here is the website if you want to take a look. www.56westsalon.com

5 months!

Ava is 5 months old!
Here are some things we would like to remember about Ava at 5 months old:

~Weight: Approx. 14 lbs.
~Height: Approx. 25 inches
~Starts to grab things and put in her mouth
~She loves to laugh!
~Trying to sit up, can stay sitting up for about 10 seconds before she falls over.
~Loves to roll over. As soon as we put her down, she is already rolling all over the place!
~Likes to look at herself in the mirror

Chubby face

This picture looks exactly like Blake did when he was a baby. Unfortunately we don't have a picture to show and compare but as soon as I saw this pic I thought of him!

This is her in her walker. She loves to play! Such a big mouth grin!

And this pic looks exactly like I did at 6 months old! She is a complete mixture of Blake and I.

Ava is such a fun baby to be around. We love her to pieces and could not imagine our life without her.

Other good news!

I forgot to mention something else about Ava. She was in the Freedom Festival Cute baby contest and she got 3rd place in the 0-3 month category! Go Ava! They not only look at how cute they are but they look at their personality too. I think she would have gotten 1st place if she had smiled right off the bat but it took her a while to warm up to the judges. She was concentrating on her feet and didn't pay attention to anything else around her.
So is so cute!

4 Months and Good News!

Ava is 4 months old! I know I say this every month but I can't believe how fast she is growing! Here are some highlights that we want to remember about Ava in her 4th month.

-12 lbs. 6 oz (24 %tile)
-24 1/2 inches long (61 %tile)
- Head circumrence 16 inches (41 %tile)
-Rolls over from back to belly and from belly to back
-eats 6 oz.
-eats every 3-3 1/2 hrs.
-loves to look at people from a distance
-easy to make her laugh
-loves her daddy, always looks around for him when he is home

Ava is such a good baby. She is still sleeping about 10-11 hrs at night. And takes frequent naps throughout the day. Which helps me out a lot so that I can get stuff done. She tried her first bowl of rice cereal. She is not sure how she feels about it. She gave us a funny face when I gave it to her. It was so cute! But she is learning to like it.

Now for the good news for me...I finally finished school! Hallelujia! I have taken and passed all of my tests and now I am just waiting to receive my licence in the mail. I am now a licenced hair stylist! I am working out my home. So if you would like me to do your hair make an appointment with me and I would love to do it!

Random pictures

Here are some random pictures of Ava...

Mommy and Ava

We caught her with her pouty face. The cutest face ever!

We like to do different faces on her

Another pouty face. Usually that means she is hungry, and sometimes it means that she is sad...

So cute!

I entered Ava into a cutest baby conference. Please vote for her!

http://todays1065.clearcontests.com/front/OpenContest.asp?Action=Login&SurveyID=72123&zx=294

She is number 140. The voting closes on Friday June 4th. Thanks!

3 Months!

Ava is now 3 months old! She is getting bigger and bigger every day! We just love her so much and love to play with her all day long. Here are some things that she has accomplished.

-11 lbs. 7 oz.

-23 1/2 inches long

-loves to talk to you

-giggled for her first time on Thursday. (video to come)

-she can stand with help

-likes attention

We don't have any pictures of her at 3 months yet but I will put some up soon.

Graduation!

I am finally done with school! It has been a long road but it has finally arrived. I actually finished school a couple of weeks ago but my graduation was last Thursday. It was fun to see all of my friends at school.

I felt stupid standing on the stage all by myself so I had to have Ava with me. Isn't she cute?

2 months!

Ava is 9 weeks now and last week we had a little photoshoot. My friend Hailee from school took these pictures before she moved and I think she did an awesome job! Here are the accomplishments for the past month:

Length: 22 1/4 inches 44.53 %tile

Weight: 9 lbs 13 oz. 25.76 %tile

Head Circumference: 15 inches 29.88 %tile

Loves to laugh!

Makes eye contact and follows you around

Can hold head up for longer periods of time

Loves to play

Loves to splash in the tub

Sleeps 8-9 hours during the night

Tries to roll over

Ava is growing up so fast and we fall in love with her more and more each day! We think she is the cutest baby and we love to play with her every day.