Now that we know that Em is the "Messiest Kid Alive", it's only fair that I update about Ava too. I snapped this picture of her yesterday while I was brushing the mulch off of Emily to prepare her for the journey across the house and upstairs to the bath.
Recently, a friend who has known Ava from birth passed through town. Ava was excited to show off her newly decorated room. My friend looked around Ava's room, decorated with posters from Mary Poppins on Broadway, Barbie paraphernalia, a bulletin board decorated with pictures of her cousins and friends, and her freshly made bed (Ava's new housekeeping skill) with her iCarly bear in it's place of honor on the pillow, then looked and me and said, "Wow. She's like a 'kid' now. Not a baby...but a kid."
Yeah. I know. And it's a little bittersweet.
Ava is growing up SO fast. I can hardly believe that she'll be starting kindergarten next month! She's having a busy summer. That seems to be how she's the happiest....busy! (She really is a mini-me). She kicked off the summer with her dance recital, then she was off visiting my family in Indiana for a week, playing with cousins, and attending a "Princess" dance camp and vacation bible school. We picked her up so that she could enjoy a few days at the lake with Mike's family and then it was home in time for the Fourth of July with her little girlfriends. This week she's doing "Safety Town", a tradition in Ohio for children entering kindergarten, where they learn about bus safety, fire safety, stranger danger, etc. Next week, she's super-psyched to do VBS with all of her church friends here, and then it's cheer camp with all of her neighborhood girlfriends for 3 days. She adores our neighbor and sometime babysitter, a soon-to-be high school senior who will be one of her counselors at camp. Are you tired yet? After cheer camp, she heads back to Indiana for a week with Grandma Pammy and Papa Nick (Mike's parents) and a week of adventures with cousin Nicholas. Whew! After that, we'll have two weeks to "chill" and then I'll be walking her right through those elementary school doors. *sniff*
Part of me misses "Baby Avy" and part of me can't wait to see what she'll do next. On any given day she's already an artist, a cook (Gee, I wonder where she gets that from?), a scholar (she loves to read...chapter books now!), a philosopher...or is it an anthropologist("So if the dinosaurs were here before the cave men, were the cave men Adam and Eve's kids?"), a minister (she converted the tree in front of our house into a "church" and leads her girlfriends in prayer regularly), a drama queen, a singer, a princess, a tom boy (she can climb trees like a monkey and makes a mean mudpie), a fashionista (she's in the dresses ONLY phase right now), a teacher ("Emily, you write an "E" like this!"), a skilled negotiator and debater, a social butterfly, a budding swimmer, and much more!
Still, at the end of the day she curls up to me in her bed during storytime and begs me to snuggle "just a little bit longer" when I close the book. I know that this won't always be her request. She's a big kid now, after all.
