Ava's dance3

Join a live video chat now! onmouseout="javascript:this.src='https://secure.oovoo.com/oovooRooms/Images/Templates/VCR-Template1-btn.png'" />

Finally, a movie that is Ava-appropriate!

From what I have read about children and TV viewing (which is not that much), children before the age of two cannot process the images they see on a show into a logical story sequence. To them the images are just that, images. I would beg to differ, maybe, at least in Ava's case. For Christmas, Ava's great-grandmother gave Ava "The Seventh Brother," a movie about a dog that gets left by his family by accident in the woods, and is adopted by a family of rabbits. We let her watch it one day, and the moment the dog gets left and tries to get the attention of his owners by barking, whimpering, and then crying, Ava burst into inconsolible tears. We thought that it maybe was the sad music.
Then it happened again, at a babysitter's house. Ava joined other children in watching "Hephalumps and Woozles," a Winnie the Pooh movie. I guess there is a part where the parents get trapped in a cage and are calling for help or something? Ava stopped crying only when the situation in the movie was resolved, from what I was told. "March of the Penguins" also put her in tears, and Josh and I were ready to give up on finding any movies that we would watch while Ava was awake.
However, Josh gave me "The Happiest Millionaire" for my birthday. (Hopefully all of you have seen this intriguing musical) Sooo....NO TEARS! Only happiness and dancing:0) So if you are at a loss of appropriate movies for your family, make sure to avoid "The Seventh Brother," "Hephalumps and Woozles," and "March of the Penguins," and instead reach for movies about opinionated, boxing millionares on chocolate cake diets, whose pet crocodiles freeze and daughters elope.

Trip to Arizona

We just returned from a short trip to Beautiful-Arizona-That-I-Miss, to see off Elder Kishpaugh III. (He is the third Kishpaugh boy to serve.) Our trips there are always too short, but it was fun and crammed full of stuff to do: family birthday parties, dinners, swimming, family pictures, missionary brunches, tons of yummy junk food, and late nights. Sadly, I wasn't able to fit in visiting with quite a few people I thought I would be able to visit so that is sad :o(. But it was fun and, of course, we always come back :o)! So here are some pics:

We actually were not present during this picture; they just sent it to us: Elder Cameron D. Kishpaugh to serve in the Maryland Baltimore mission.

Josh and his brother, Jason, contributing to the musicality of the trip. Lovely!

Josh and his three siblings, Jason, Cameron, and Aleese, together for the last time for two years

Yay, I had a birthday and Josh's awesome family threw me a combined party with Josh's cousin, Porter, who turned six two days after my birthday:)

Our Fourth of July!

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY! I am so grateful for this country, our freedoms, the beauty of the land, the bounty we enjoy. We are so blessed!

We decided to celebrate a small town Fourth of July and went to visit Logandale, Nevada (a very small town where my sister lives with her husband and daughter.) They have one grocery store and no stoplights, just to give you the idea of how small it is. The town put on a flag raising ceremony, followed by a free pancake breakfast, and then the annual "candy drop." It was so cool that a culture like that still exists. So we got up at the crack of dawn and went to the flag raising ceremony, ate delicious pancakes, and got ready for the candy drop. I guess it is their substitute for a parade because they send a guy up in an ultralight aircraft (it looks like a kite with a motor) and then he flys over the fairgrounds a couple times and drops 100 pounds of candy onto the grass. The field becomes a fighting frenzy for sugar and then it's over.

So like I said, we got ready for the candy drop, finding a nice shady spot under a tree. The ultralight took off, the kids lined up for the dash of the year. As the ultralight turned toward the fairgrounds, we noticed that the kids were all looking our way. This was a little awkward for my sister, who was nursing her baby. "Why is everyone looking at me?" she laughed. The sound of a motor drew our eyes skyward. The ultralight was over our head; we saw him, as well as a sky speckled loads of saltwater taffy and Bit o' Honeys! AHHH! If you have ever had 100 pounds of candy dropped on your head, you will understand how we felt. It's weird! Split seconds later we were drowning in a flood of screaming children; my sister nursing her baby, Ava clinging to my legs, it was classic:)

That day we played and talked together, Ava played in the wading pool with her cousin, and we had an American dinner. We made red, white, and blue popsicles and a red, white, and blue dessert (strawberry shortcake with berries, hmmm my mouth is watering...) That night we watched a pretty awesome fireworks show for a tiny town and part of the small town tradition is for everyone to shoot off illigal fireworks. So although we did not participate in such evil, we were surrounded by it:) and I was sure we were going to get blown up. (A little jumpy, yes, I am!)

I hope you all enjoyed your holiday!

A Quick Update

We love Ava and wanted to share a little video of her saying some words. I'm sure that pretty soon we won't be able to keep her quite, but for now we love her talking!

Wow, last time we entered anything Josh had just finished his spring semester and now it has been so long that he is almost done with his summer semester! (Sorry any faithful readers:) So far this summer, we haven't done any traveling, but it has still been fun. Josh has been gone every day from about 9:00 am to 8:00 pm with school and work, so that left the house to me and Ava! YESSSSS! We did miss Josh, but there is something about being the queen of the house:) Beginning this week, though, Josh gets to be home in the morning and we are also SUPER happy for that.

So what did I do all day without a car with an eighteen month old? Play, swim, clean, cook, eat, eat, read, write, among other things. I find that I am happiest when I embrace the role of mother and strive to enjoy even the daily chores. Life is very good right now. We are learning a lot.

Josh is done with the spring semester, finally!!! So he has more time to spend with Katie and Ava. We all went on a bike ride to the park and Ava loved it, well she loves any chance she gets to be outside. Josh is trying to get her started on basketball early as you can see. Katie and Josh finally found a way to attend the temple. We had to drive out to Logandale, about an hour away, so that Katie's sister, Anna, could babysit. It made for a very long day, but very worth it. The temp. got into the 100's last week but then dropped down into the low 70's towards the end of the week, which was nice. We are planning an overnight camping trip for memorial day. It will be Ava's first. There is also a picture of Ava in her crib. So you know, she organized that sleep over all by herself! She is getting so big and talking so much. She has done fabulous in nursery the past few weeks and we hope that it will continue. She is definately her mother's daughter.

Our Trip

Last weekend Josh, Ava, and I went to the Grand Canyon for the first time! It was really beautiful and seemed almost surreal.­ We left Friday morning and because we were meeting family in Flagstaff and they weren't going to get there until late afternoon, we decided to take our time traveling and go along a piece of "Historic Route 66.­" We were inspired by the Disney movie, "Cars.­" So Thursday night, I printed out some information from the internet and on our way, we stopped in the little towns and tried to find the landmarks from Route 66's hayday.­ It was really fun; Ava even seemed to enjoy it.­ We stopped in one town, Seligman, Arizona, that is in the extras on "Cars.­" We bought a malt from a place that advertised that they sold "TACOS, BURITTOS, AND DEAD CHICKEN," visited a barber shop that thrived before the freeway bypassed the town, and found a car that may have been the inspiration for Stanley in the movie.­

That night, we went to the Lowell Observatory and got to see Saturn through a telescope that weighs six tons and its mount is thirteen tons.­ We also looked at the moon and Mars.­ The Lowell Observatory is where Pluto was discovered.­

Then, then next morning, we went to the National Geographic Grand Canyon visitor center and watched an IMAX movie on the Grand Canyon.­ That was cool because we only had a day, and the movie showed things that we would never have been able to see ourselves and also told about the history of it.­ Finally, we went to the south rim of the canyon and hiked a couple of miles along it.­ (I say hiked, but it was really a paved pathway.­) It was beautiful and the perfect time of year to go, as it gets up to 120 degrees in the summer.­ It looks like a picture and you can walk right up to the edge, at your own risk.­ We saw deer and elk and some huge birds, too.­ So I recommend going, but it would have been better if we could have spent a few more days there and hiked down into the canyon.­

Ava's favorite things to do at the canyon were climb on the boulders next to the pathway and eat dirt.­