fresh meat

Merely days following our past entry, Alex went in for Anterior Cervical Spinal Fusion Surgery. A disc in her neck had extruded it's way into the spinal cord and was causing her left arm to go numb. The procedure called for the offending disc to be removed and replaced with bone, fusing the two adjacent vertebrae together. Both the operation and recovery went very well and she was back to normal about a month later.

Going in...


Before:


After:


Nine days after:


Without surprise, Ava has been keeping us busy. These days she is deep into all things princess, the word "why", "MY SHOWS", and attempting to defy gravity.
Check out that lump!


Our winter has been weak by my standards, but we did manage to get one snowman made this season.


The past few months Ava has attended an introductory ballet class. She did relatively well considering the attention span of a three year old.




Ava is also interested in any art project. Markers, crayons, glue, glitter, scissors all bring a smile to her face. In school she gets plenty of opportunity to get her fix. One day she came home with this:


Here we are coloring Easter eggs:


Grandpa invited us out to the ranch for a horse ride a few weeks ago and contrary to what I thought Ava might think of sitting on a large moving animal, five feet off the ground, she ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT.




I'll conclude with our most recent news. Ava has a brand new cousin! Zoie was born at 00:00:01 on April 11th, surely the #1 kid born on this day. Ava has naturally been highly anticipating this day and participated in Dr. appointments and baby showers.




...without further delay, & at the risk of breaking the news to the internet before the parents, here she is:




And, as a parting shot, here's some Ava video from about 10 days ago.