All about Ava Drew!

I am SO behind on my monthly updates for Ava Drew. Instead, I will just update on what she is doing.

• Ava Drew is probably the funniest and sassiest little diva I have ever met. 
• Her favorite thing to do is watch Barney on my phone. She got in a bad habit of playing on my phone all the time when we were living in a empty house. She was bored so she fell in love with my phone. ha! Now, we are trying to limit her time on my phone now that she has toys to play with and books to read. 
• Ava has all of the sudden become a snuggler and I am LOVING it!!! 
• She can almost count to 10. She skips 1,5,7, and 9. We are working on it! :) 
• You can SPELL YOUR NAME!! I know, my not even two year old can spell her name. Granted, her name only consists of 2 letters. 
• Her favorite song to sing is "Wain wain, go away". We have gotten lots of rain lately. 
• She loves "hamburgers" and every time we drive into sonic, she assumes she is getting a hamburger. 
• She loves to draw and every time she see's a pen, she insists on drawing and throws a tantrum if we don't let her. She says "A" which means she wants to draw. Why? Because every time Bryce draws with her, he spells out her name on the paper and she tries to write her name. 

• She has always been really good at going down for naps and bedtime but lately, it has been a huge challenge. 
• We still haven't potty trained her yet but we are starting that next week. She is so ready but we wanted to get settled first before we took on that challenge!! Any tips? 

Cheyenne Frontier Days and Family!!

I am back tracking on this post a little bit. My family came to visit us for a week during Cheyenne Frontier Days! They came two weeks before we got our stuff so they had to sleep on blow up mattresses and eat on fold out chairs with us!! It was fun!

We stayed SO busy while my family was here. They got here late on a Sunday night so on Monday, we decided to get out of the house and explore Cheyenne. We went to Frontier Park which is where the rodeos and concerts take place. There is also lots of rides and food booths and venues. We walked around and let Ava go on a slide ride with Bryce. She LOVES slides so we thought she would love it. We were wrong. She hated it. Poor thing.

On Tuesday, we went to the parade downtown. We live about 3 blocks from downtown so we just walked. Ava loved the parade. I think the "Neighs" (horses) were her favorite. This town is about as country as it gets. And I thought Texans were country....the town of Cheyenne doesn't even compare!! 

Thanks to my sister Sarah for the cute collage.

Once the parade was over, we hurried home to get in the car and go to Estes Park in Colorado for the day. We climbed a mountain, explored a waterfall/river and drove around the beautiful park. We all had a blast. We saw lots of animals like elk, sheep, deer, and a bison. 

Ava looks scares sad but she really wasn't. She was happy to be cuddled in her Pop's arms. 

Can you spot Bryce? He was in heaven! Nature is his thing!!

It was really chilly on top of the mountain and Ava thought it was so funny that she got to wear her Momma's jacket!!

During Frontier Days (which is a week long), there is a huge pancake breakfast. This year, they served over 30,000 people! And its FREE!! So on Wednesday, we went and stayed in line for about 30 minutes. The line was probably a mile long. It wrapped around a building and zigzagged all the way down the road. It was crazy! But the line went pretty fast and we were always moving so it wasn't bad at all. We got free pancakes, so why not!!

Once the pancake breakfast was over, we walked around the downtown area and checked out a few antique shops. Bryce had to go shoot for work so he left around noon and the rest of us went home to relax for the afternoon. We were so exhausted! 

On Thursday, we went to the parade again. There were 3 parades during Frontier Days. We heard the parade on Thursday was supposed to be the best one so that's why we went a second time. After it was over, we went to the state museum which was a couple blocks away from the parade. We wanted to check out the Capitol but we ran out of time. 

On Friday, we left really early and went to Mt. Rushmore!! It was about a 4 hour drive. We got there around noon, toured Mt. Rushmore, then went downtown to eat lunch and check out a few shops. 

The next morning, my family got up bright and early to hit the road back to Texas. We really enjoyed their visit and we were so sad to see them leave. 

Moving to Cheyenne!!

Hello Blog World! I know I have been MIA for the past couple of months but I think I have a pretty good reason. We moved across the world back to the U.S.A. and we are finally getting settled in Cheyenne, WY!

Once we got to Cheyenne, we stayed in TLF (temporary living facility aka hotel) for 10 days until we found a house. We had a HARD time finding a decent place to call home. We get a small allowance that doesn't leave us many options as far as houses go. The house that we found is tiny and much smaller than our house in Germany...like, its probably half of the size. So, we have a ton of stuff stored in our garage. Thankfully, it is a huge garage so our stuff fits perfectly in there. Hopefully we will only be here about 9 more months and then we can move again. yay!

Since we lived without our stuff for 2 1/2 months, we are not attached to our stuff at all. We have so much stuff that we don't "need". We will be having a HUGE garage sale soon.

We are slowly getting settled in. Almost all of our boxes are unpacked but we need to get organized and put more stuff in our garage. I haven't been feeling well lately so things have been progressing SLOWLY!!

This was one of TWO trucks! There are four crates on this truck and we had 8 crates total!! Too. Much. Stuff!!