A Sunday School Lesson Learned

If you chance to meet a frown, do not let it stay...

...quickly turn it upside down and smile that frown away.

No one likes a frowny face, change it for a smile....

...make the world a better place by smiling all the while.

Froggy Tricks

Ava and Nala

Because Ava's dad won't let her have a puppy, we gave Nala to Ava as a puppy substitute.

At first, Ava was not quite sure what to think of Nala.

But soon the two became the best of friends.

Here Ava is sharing all of her secrets with Nala.

Then she pleaded with her fairy godmother to make Nala come alive.

That didn't work, but Ava decided that Nala wasn't such a bad puppy substitute after all. Looks like Lily Mae may have some competition for Ava's affection.

Learning To Crawl

For the last several days, Ava has been showing signs that learning to crawl has moved its way to the top of her to-do-list. Having mastered rolling over, crawling seemed the logical next step. However, what we've witnessed her doing as she moves from point A to point B is not what one might call crawling. We're not sure what to call it, but knew that still images would do it no justice. So, we decided to capture her movement on video. Then, however, came the problem of how to get the video off the camcorder and on to the blog.

We purchased our first camcorder last November before Ava was born. The camcorder records in a high-definition format called AVCHD, which is supposedly the next big thing in the world of "prosumer" camcorders. In the meantime, however, the format is not supported by most video editing software (at least not without spending a lot of money). So this meant we had to resort to using the Sony-developed software which came free with the camcorder. Typically the software which ships with consumer electronics leaves much to be desired. In this case, we have to credit Sony with actually making decent software once you figure out how to use it. The main problem was trying to understand the manual, which was obviously written by a Japanese speaker that thought he could construct intelligible sentences in English.

Fear not...after several hours we figured out how to convert the AVCHD file to MPEG-2 and make it small enough to just squeak by You Tube's 100 MB size limit. Without further adieu, we present Ava in her feature film premiere....

(We had wanted to lay down an audio track of the theme song from Chariots of Fire, but one can only accomplish so much with an instruction manual written in broken English.)

Sun Valley Redux

We decided to share a few more pictures from our vacation last month to Sun Valley. While we were there we were able to take Ava for her second swim.

Ava's first swim was when we were down in Las Vegas last March for the Mountain West basketball tournament. However, the water was pretty cold so she never really got in the water, but instead sat in Larry's lap within an inner tube.

This time around the water was bathtub warm and Ava truly enjoyed herself as evidenced by the large amounts of water she splashed into her parents' faces as she kicked her legs and flailed her arms.

The weather in Sun Valley was beautiful and Ava loved taking walks with her parents while soaking up the rays of sun (they don't call it Sun Valley for nothing).

However, baby skin can only take so much sun; and so the shade proved a welcome rest from the heat.

Here's a picture taken before we gave Ava the flower which produced the pictures we shared previously.

This is her contemplating how she can finagle that flower from dad.

As you know from our previous Sun Valley post, she was successful. Well, that does it for the Sun Valley pictures this year.

Wardrobe Independence