Did my child just talk?

I don't know if you have ever seen the movie "A Few Good Men," but there is a scene in that movie where a father is pushing his child in a stroller and the father says to his friend, "she just said "Pa!"  The friend points out that the child was pointing at a mailbox, at which point the father says "as if to say "Pa, a mailbox!"  I have become this parent.  I say to Ava "say ball" and when she very purposely says, "Ba!" I tell her she did a great job saying "ball."  Also, when our cat walks by and I say, "say Cat" and she says "Ca" I tell her she did a great job saying "Cat."  We want so badly for our children to be accomplishing something new everyday. 

Ava is SO CLOSE to walking.  We want her to walk so badly and so we try to encourage her by standing just out of her reach and saying, "come to mama."  I know she will walk when she is ready, and I also know that once she is running all over the place I will wish she would go back to slow crawling so I can keep up.  But, right now we really want her to walk, because we know that she will enjoy walking and it will open up her world to so many different things.  Just in the last few days she has started standing on her own without touching anything and she does it more and more often everyday, but so far we haven't gotten more than one step.

I have to say one of the best things about having a child is listening to their laughter.  I feel like recently Ava has more and more often done this belly laugh when she gets happy about something.  Whether we are rolling a ball back and forth on the floor, playing "peek-a-boo," or if I am pretending that she is chasing me with her push cart as she walks around.  I just LOVE to make her laugh.  She can make me smile until my cheeks hurt.  I know one day all too soon she won't laugh with such abandon as she does now, but for now I will just enjoy it.

I just wanted to write down a few of the things Ava is doing right now, and keep you all up to date.