Silly Cheeks!

This kid cracks my stuff up.

I wonder, what's the average age at which a squishmonkey develops a sense of humor?

I think Ava's pulling ahead of the curve on this milestone.

For instance, she doesn't give two pacifiers for "Wheels on the Bus" or "The Alphabet Song", but sing her some Black Eyed Peas (and you gotta really try to sound like Fergie), and she'll air-jig right outta your arms.  She also gets very excited about the ukelele duet from the movie The Jerk.

Ava doesn't just explore the world by depositing things in her mouth like most babies.  Sometimes, just a mischievous lick will do.  I blame myself for this, since I give her dabs of tastes like ice cream, lemon and guacamole when we're out and about.  She'll poke her little strawberry tongue out, and I'll satisfy her curiosity by scooping some bit of deliciousness with a clean finger and dabbing it directly upon her taste buds.  This is fine when we're sitting at El Parian, awaiting our fajitas. This is bad, bad, bad when Honey Boo Boo Dog's humongous face is hovering within an inch of the baby swing.  I wonder what Great Dane snot tastes like.  Ava knows.....

She loooooves to splash.  The first time we introduced her to the pool, she took off like a regatta cup depended on it.  It amazed us that she knew exactly what to do in water -- she instinctively moved her body to propel herself across the expanse, and she kicked and splashed with breathless glee.  This forever changed her relationship with liquids, which was adorable (if not somewhat messy) during every bath time since.  It did, however, complicate her last 
gastroenterologist appointment, where she peed like an Italian fountain on the baby weight scale and splashed around like Michael Flatley until the soggy nurse mopped up her self-made wading pool and I fumbled for some wipes to clean the piddle from her fat rolls.

Most of all, she loves to jabber.  I admit, it shocked the phooey out of me that she would attempt to verbalize much at all.  Every medical text I've consulted discourages holding any expectation of a child with Down Syndrome speaking within the same time frame of a typically developing child.  But don't tell her that.  It seems like one day her speech breaker flipped  ON and she decided that she would spontaneously begin showing off her full vocabulary of baby babble.  Her Bloom County-inspired "Pfffft!" morphed into "blrrbabluhbrrrbrrrbrrrr!" (please reference the video in the previous blog entry for clarification), which quickly became a percussive "Bah bah bah!", which was a short stopover from "Da da da!", after which the brass ring of baby talk was finally attained: 

"MMMMMAMAMAMAAAAAA!"

Yessss. 

I know that parenting isn't a contest, buuuut....

 WINNING!