July, Part II

One more of these, and we can get back to the good stuff!  This will be July 20 - August 1...  I think the August 1st pictures are the ones I'm MOST saddened to have lost!  That's the day we went sightseeing in Chicago and went to Chinatown!  My mom has pictures of the trip though...... hopefully some of them turned out okay... ;)  Just kidding, mom!  :D

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FB - July 19 at 11:36pm: Great one from yesterday... Jason: "Look, Ava! Zombies!" - Jason and Ava were watching a preview for some video game... haha...


FB - July 21 at 12:15am: I am REALLY tempted to cut my own hair. Someone talk me out of it. Here are a couple points you can bring up:
(1) The haircut I gave myself (and IAN) when I was 4 1/2 ended with me having one of those hideous 80s bobs.  
(2) The time I tried to cut my own bangs in 7th grade, they ended up too short and totally crooked, and that was on the FRONT of my head...
GOOD NEWS!!  I was successfully talked out of what was bound to be a TERRIBLE idea!  My mom promised to take me to get my hair cut when she visited at the end of July/beginning of August.  More info on those stories: (1) Ian got a buzz using a #2, and you could STILL see where I cut his hair!  I'm kinda surprised I didn't make him bleed! (2) I'm not proud of this, but I told people my mom had cut my bangs.... 

Photo - July 21 at 12:45pm: On a walk with the dogs... Ava is helping me walk Lucy!  What a CUTIE!!

NOTE - *Some time around July 21st, I found MADE!  :)  Sometime in July, I started reading blogs.  I've got a whole bunch I follow these days, but this was the beginning!  Dana has the CUTEST sewing ideas for kids!  Plus, she blogs about other great things, like her thrift-store finds (and repurposing), Project Runway, and other fun things!

FB - July 22 at 1:03am: With only 12 days to go until Ava's 1st birthday, she FINALLY decided to learn how to give mommy kisses! YAY!!!

Comment (from my mom) - July 23 at 9:34pm: And don't forget...5 days til Grandma goes to visit Ava...

Yay!  If only the kisses hadn't been a one-time occurrence!  Yeah.  She totally doesn't do that... ever.  She does give great hugs though!

FB - July 23 at 2:56am: The thunder is loud... and I guess it scares Ava... So much for me going to bed early.... - Ava seems to like thunder as much as my sister, Suzi, did when she was little.  I still remember that picture of her asleep on the couch with her fingers in her ears... ;)


Photo - July 23 at 10:28am: Ummm.... this is a picture that shows that I'm seriously an engineer!  It rained a TON the night before (hence the thunder)... I couldn't believe how deep the water is in this open channel (errr... stream...) near our house!  The three rectangular culverts are REALLY BIG, but I can see why now!  Holy cow!  This really makes me want to break out Manning's Equation.  .... I wonder if I can even remember what it is off the top of my head... 


*NERDY TANGENT* Q=(a generic coefficient to make the eqn work... 1.49?)*(coefficient of friction)*slope^(1./2)*(wetted perimeter, Ro)^(2/3)... and I think you have to divide by something... or maybe it's the area divided by the wetted perimeter?  Wow... I obviously haven't done engineering in a while... Let's look that up.  ......  So close, yet so far.  I would have figured it out when the units didn't work.  Except for the coefficient, as it's unitless.  Actually, I take that back.  The units don't work out in this equation.  That's what the 1.49 is for.  Yay for empirical equations! :P


Q = (1.486/n)*Rh^(2/3)*s^(1/2)*A 
where n=coefficient of friction, Rh (hydraulic radius) = Area/Pw (wetted perimeter), s = slope, A = Area, and Q = flowrate, in cfs. *END NERDY TANGENT* 


Let's just look at the nerdy picture now.  Yep.  Not very exciting.  A lot of water...

FB - July 23 at 11:21am: Uggggghhhhh! I HATE Huggies!!!! - Some friends of ours gave us a LOT of Huggies when their kid grew out of them, and they do NOT work on Ava.  I haven't cleaned up so many leaks and overloads since before Ava starting eating solids at 6 months!


Photo - July 23 at 2:09pm: This must have been the day we went to Panera, because this is one of Panera's AMAZING Toffee Nut Cookies!  They are buttery and toffee-y and nutty (in a Brazilian way) and delicious! I knew to order one, because they're a popular place to get catering from, and Jason brought me home one of these cookies once... :)  YUMMMMM.....   The rest of the food was good, too... but kind of expensive.  I think we spent like $20 for the two of us.  Next time I'll get McDonald's from across the street and just stop by for just a cookie!  :)  Mmmmm.... now I want McDonald's french fries.....

Photo - July 23 at 11:42pm: This was a random picture on Jason's phone.  A mama cat feeding her kittens...  I assume Jason helped the mommy cat give birth or something.  Otherwise, why would he have this picture?  Aren't they cute, clawing and biting each other to get some milk?  (Kidding...)  So tiny!!!

FB - July 24 at 12:15am: Arrrghhh... it's thundering really loudly again! I hope Ava sleeps through it this time!  I think she did....  Enough said.


Photo - July 24 at 6:33pm: This is a picture of Suzi I took with my phone from a Skype conversation we had with her on her 21st birthday!  (She wanted me to have a new picture to have pop up on my phone when she calls.  The one I have is of her at like 16 or something.)  Suzi loves to Skype with Ava, of course, even though Ava usually runs around the whole time!  :)

Isn't she cute?  She's married though, sorry!

FB - July 27 at 11:19pm: Sara Andersen Ferrell has been cooking thinly sliced potatoes (like 0.5 cm thick, in a milk/cream mushroom soup mix) in the crock pot for LITERALLY 14 hours on a combo of high and low temps, and they're still firmer than I'd like them.... Any advice? I swear I've made this recipe before without issue... - Yeah, I think my crock pot died.  My mommy bought me a new one!  :)

FB - July 29 at 2:31pm: Target... CHECK! Walmart... CHECK! Ikea... :) I'm off to Swedish-land! :) - Yay!!!  Shopping with my mom is the BEST!!!


Photo - July 30 at 7:14am: Ummmmm.... I think this is a photographic evidence that Jason can catch a fly between his fingers.  He may need to register his hands as weapons...

Photos - July 30 at 11:34pm: I got a haircut!  It's an angled bob, but since my hair is curly, it looks fairly crazy.  It's growing out well though!

FB - August 1 at 7:07pm: Had a great time in Chicago today! We saw the Chicago Bean ("Cloud Gate") and went to China Town for dim sum! - This was REALLY fun!  We only have 3 pictures... (I'd have thought with the amount of time Jason spent photographing the bean he'd have had more than that, but I guess not...)  The three pictures were only taken 28 seconds apart, too... not sure what happened there!  I need to get pictures from my mom.  When I do, I'll post some.


Photos - August 1 at 12:48pm: These are pictures of Jason and Ava reflected in the Bean, AND photographic evidence that my mom not only exists, but visited us in Chicago!  That's her walking behind Jason and Ava in the third picture!  

Anyway, that concludes our (boring) recap of June and July!  Stay tuned for (way) more exciting things, like Ava's birthday and Ava's interesting fashion preferences and ummm.... other stuff that I'm sure is thrilling.  Yeah... let's go with that. ;)

With the Fishes

Our first adventure into Chicago was to go to the Shedd Aquarium with some other ladies and babies/toddlers from church.  (Jason was working...)  It's usually quite expensive to visit the aquarium, but most of the museums, zoos, etc. here have a few free days each month.  Those are VERY busy days, because so many people take advantage of them!  During the school year, I think they make field trip days free days so that people with memberships can avoid the huge crowds.

It didn't take as long to get downtown as I thought it might, but traffic gets heavy pretty quick when you're heading that way!  It was surprisingly easy to get there, too.  You just drive down I-55, until it tees into Lake Shore Drive... You go left and drive down 2 or 3 blocks, and the aquarium, museum, planetarium, and Soldier Field are all over on the right. Parking costs $16 for under 4 hours, $19 for longer!  OUCH!  Carpooling is recommended!

On the way from the parking garage to the aquarium, we passed the Field Museum of Natural History, and the very first legit hot dog stand I've ever seen!  :)  I didn't get one.  In fact, I haven't had a Chicago dog in the 4+ months I've been here.  Here, they're all about mustard, which I d-e-s-p-i-s-e.  A lot.  Blegh!  In fact, the only topping on a standard Chicago-style hot dog I LIKE is tomato.  So yeah, I'm sticking to the pizza.

Left: Field Museum — Right: Shedd Aquarium

Look!  A hot dog cart!  Like in While You Were Sleeping!

The line was QUITE long, so I had time to snap some pictures.  The Sears Tower has been the tallest building in the United States, at 1451 feet, since it was built in 1973, surpassing the World Trade Center towers.  It was the tallest building in the world until 1998.  And YES.  That includes those two white antennas.  (And yes, I think that's cheating.  Sorry, Chicago!)

Bottom Left: Former Sears Tower (now "Willis" Tower...dumb!)
Bottom Right: That's a great lake—Lake Michigan!

Ava was having a lot of fun being admired... :)  The kids we were with thought she was really cute... and I tend to agree with them... :)

Left: Ava was very popular with the kids we were with.
Top Right: Ava and Mom in front of a fish fountain.
Bottom Right: The only picture mom took of Ava "with" a fish... Oops!

We finally got in, and I took quite a few (mostly bad) pictures before my battery died.  I left the spare in the car for some stupid reason.  Grrr!  I didn't even take a picture of Ava INSIDE the aquarium!  The best I got was a picture of her in the reflection of one of the exhibits (above, bottom right).

There were a LOT of fish and other critters.  Some were huge, some tiny, some uglier than sin, some beautiful, some harmless, some deadly.  Some weren't even aquatic creatures.  There were monkeys!  !!!  I was like, "Ummmmmmm.... guys?"  No, but seriously, there were parts of the aquarium that showed different ecosystems, and one showed everything from the treetops to the lake bottom.  Make sense?  Yeah... I thought they were stretching...  Oooh... I LOVED the blue frogs!  SOOOO pretty, but seriously poisonous!

Top Left: Some kind of very large lobster; Top Right: Big Turtles
Bottom Left: A monkey............ at the aquarium..............
Bottom Middle: Very pretty and very poisonous frog.  Do not touch.
Bottom Right: "Morning Sunstar"... My dog has that toy in green.  :P

There were pretty things, like this.... ummmm...  errrrr.... *googles* Okay, help me out!  I'm spacing on what this stuff is called!  Apparently googling "pretty underwater stuff" isn't specific enough!  :P

Pretty... stuff....!

And there were CREEPY things....

Can you say ANACONDA?  Scary!

Overall, we had a fun day!  Ava didn't really "get it," but she likes riding in her stroller, so that worked!  I wish I'd had that extra camera battery though!  I didn't get any picture of the beluga whales, the dolphins, or the sea lions!  And I would have LOVED to take a video of the jelly fish!  They were beautiful and totally transfixing...  We'll have to go back soon for more pictures... The jellies exhibit goes through May 28, 2012!

For more info on the museum:  http://www.sheddaquarium.org/

Free day schedule:  http://www.sheddaquarium.org/discounts.html

EDIT:  Found this picture of Ava on my cell phone!  See?  I DID take a picture of Ava at the museum!  (Please excuse the TERRIBLE quality.  I hadn't gotten my new phone yet...)

This is the first time Ava ever
fell asleep in her stroller!  CUTE!