The Heits are Home!

This is Sunday night. The Heit kids (all that are able to come this year) are back for the Holiday! Playmate for Chelsea! She is getting good at playing with/around other kids now. She even asks for them by name. She'll be asking for Reed now. :)

Ooh! Itty bitty puppy!

Puzzlement. She is actually very good at puzzles now. In nursery she is completely uninterested in the play-doh that they play with, so she does puzzles instead.

We didn't get too many pictures of the two of them together. My camera batteries died. They seemed to enjoy each other's company though!

Chelsea was funny today. She was wearing snowflake pajamas. Then she found her "hoppos" (hippos) in her diaper bag and tried to put them on over the snowflakes. Hoppos on! On! *grunting with effort* On! Hoppos! So I obliged. Then she found Daddy's hat from the Minot Daily. Hat on. Hat off. Hat on. Hat off.

Sillyness! I got lucky with this one! I got a shot of the biggest grin she gave me. Oh such fun! And this is RIGHT before naptime too!

Just you wait, Minot Daily! I've got a future newspaper carrier in the making!

Hat on, hat off, hat on, hat off. She was cute putting the hat on for the pictures and then taking it off to look at them on the camera. Funny girl.
I've been trying to upload a cute video of her actually getting the hat on all by herself. But blogger isn't cooperating. Maybe I'll try facebook. Check there next time you are on facebook, folks!

Photo Sessions/Winter

We had a couple photo sessions for Christmas cards. (That we have not gotten around to making yet, sorry) This is one way to get her to sit down nicely in front of the tree with the presents and toys...but looking down. Grrr. Oh well. Still very cute.

So we took away the book and got a booster seat. She looked up! Fingers in the mouth. Of course.

Big smiles! This one is a bit blurry, (grumble grumble) but one of my favorites!

Kiss the cutie! It's so hard to take pictures nowadays. Chelsea likes to look at them more than pose for them. Oh well. We tried! This is our second photo session at Grandma Kelly's.

I don't remember what she was objecting to here. Probably putting down the camera. Or looking up from the camera. Or smiling. Or anything else that we were trying to get her to do. ;P

We had to do a little distracting from the camera. Flippin' Frogs! She LOVES these frogs! Can you blame her?

Uh, oh! The bow came off! How could THAT have happened?

She has been chewing on her fingers a lot recently. Two days ago, her top incisors finally broke through! That explains the fingers in the mouth.

One of our favorites. Too bad it's a little out of focus. Sigh.

It's officially winter now in North Dakota. Sub-zero temperatures and snow snow snow! We are enjoying it, despite frosty windows and the outside door being frosted over and the latch frozen open.

Chelsea loves her snowsuit. Daddy is helping her here, but if we just lay the suit out flat on the floor, she will come over and lay down on it and wait for us to help her get her arms and legs in it. So cute!

Here is my strawberry marshmallow all ready to go! Well, except for her boots, which she also enjoys wearing. Ah winter.

From Thanksgiving to Christmas

!Gavin, Chelsea, and Tyjah at the Hornbacher's for Thanksgiving. These kids are so much fun! Chelsea was a little shy at first, but she warmed up pretty quick. She's not used to having too many people, especially kids, around. *sigh*

This kitchen really helped Chelsea come out of her shell with all the strange people around. The kitchen set is the toy in nursery that she is willing to brave the other kids for also. We recently bought a kitchen set for here at home. We couldn't resist giving it to her early. She doesn't understand the significance of presents at Christmas yet anyway. Well she LOVES it! Definitely a worthy investment.

Jennifer holding the youngest member of the family, Gatlin (I think I spelled that right) He is three months old. What a cutie!

"Wii" all had a great time, and it was a wonderful Thanksgiving Day! It made me look forward to Christmas when we all get together again!

She saw the camera and started saying CHEESE! repeatedly, and smiling very cutely. Yes, that's cutely.

What is she munching on? Frozen PEAS! We don't even have to heat them up. Straight out of the freezer is just fine with her. She'd eat the whole bag if we let her. Frozen corn is another favorite snack. She gets it from her Daddy.

So after the previous two pictures I was walking away to put down the camera. Chelsea gets up and follows me saying, "Cheese! Cheese! Cheese!" I guess she wanted me to take another picture. I had to oblige. This adorable little grin is the result.

Here is the nice pile of blankets that Chelsea loves to have when getting ready for bed. She gets her "pink," which is her pacifier, we read scriptures, and then rock for a couple minutes, but she's gotta have ALL her blankets on top of her or she won't relax. It's kinda funny. Whatever makes her happy I guess. ;)

Dimples! Need I say more?

I thought it was a little risky letting Chelsea help decorate the tree, just because it was going to be a "no touch" tree once it is decorated. But we couldn't just leave her out! She did very well. All the no-shatter bulbs are at the bottom. Those are pretty cool, they actually bounce!

Love those Christmas bulbs! Daddy helps get the hooks on.

Cheese!

November is almost gone?!?

Mommy had a birthday shout hooray! We tried to get all *gulp* 28 candles in the center piece. I love how there is already a piece missing too! Beth had made a cake for herself the night before and rather than make another cake, we decided to just eat the one already made! At least we knew it was good! By the way, it is difficult to blow out all those candles when they are so close together! They must get energy from each other or something. Chelsea helped me blow a little, but she didn't really know what was going on. Looks like she liked the candles though.

Cute. They aren't racing each other, but I can see that happening sometime in the future... Rick is modeling one of the pj pants that I made. They were supposed to be worn Christmas Day last year, but I hadn't gotten around to making them, so Rick had a nice pile of fabric in his stocking. I think it still took me about six more months before I actually got around to making them. But THIS year we have nice warm Christmas pj pants to open Santa's gifts in! (mine are the same fabric, only with a pink background)

Here is our little gorilla armed gal. We were grabbing some games out of the closet right before we headed off to the Grandparents house tonight. Chelsea decided she wanted to play her favorite game, Don't Break the Ice, even though she was already bundled up. Poor girl! She couldn't do ANYthing, but we let her try for a minute anyway. (see video below)

I helped her get ahold of the mallet. She couldn't do much with it and kept trying to hold it in one hand. She did manage to stand up on her own, but that's about it. She really hates it when we put her mittens on before her coat like this because she can't get them off! Bwah ha ha!!!

Here is Miss Chelsea on our way to Grandma and Grandpa Heit's house for leftover Thanksgiving food/games. Think we need to make some carseat adjustments? ;) We had mercy on her and took off the mittens. It wasn't too cold. I love how she would not let go of the ball, even though she can't move any other part of her or play with the ball at all.

Yes, I know she is crying. Wouldn't you be?
We didn't let her struggle for long. We packed her into the car right after this and enjoyed the evening with the Heits.

I know this is dark, but she was being really cute. She was dancing up a storm until I got the camera out. She danced a little, but not as much as before. This doll is not actually Tash, but looks a lot like her, but Chelsea loves it just as much as the real thing!

More recently

Ya gotta love snow in ND. It waited till mid November to snow, but it snowed 9 1/2 inches in one day! This is the sidewalk next to our garage, part of my shoveling efforts showing. They finally cleared our driveway, and now there is a gigantic snow mountain at the end of this walkway. That's Burger King across the street, which we can no longer see. :)

This is looking down the side of our house toward the back yard. The snow drift is probably as tall as me, judging by the height of the fence. I didn't actually go back there and measure, hehe.

Grandma came over to babysit one night. Chelsea likes to play with her bibs (that she never wears) but she won't usually put them on herself. Well this time she had 12 bibs on when we got home!

Silly faces all around. I was trying to get a good picture of her cute ponytail, but you can't see it very well in any of my shots.

She just looks so grown up!

This is the only good picture I got of her hair. I guess you can see it best in the video.

She knows you use the paddle to hit the balls, or balloon in this case. When Chelsea chucks them both down, she ended up hitting Auntie Beth in the knee! She survived, barely. :)

Halloween Time!

I waited till we were already at the church ready to walk in before I painted her whiskers and nose on. Here is why. She immediately rubbed her face! She did pretty well at leaving it alone for the most part. When I showed her her face in the mirror, she tried to wipe the whiskers off again. Ha! It was pretty funny. Luckily eye liner doesn't rub off easily.

What a cute cat! Meow!

She won a pencil with Winnie the Pooh on it doing a bean bag toss (see video below.) She is saying "Pooh!" Every time she said it, she threw her head back like this. Cute.

Hi, Mom!

I don't remember what she was saying here, but she was talking to Gr. and Gr. Heit.

So serious.

No, this is not supposed to be a bloody mouth, but it does look pretty cool! She was eating a gobstopper in the car while we went trick or treating to Gr. and Gr. Kelly's. This is how she looked by the time we arrived.

By the way, we are Bella and Edward from Breaking Dawn, book four of the Twilight Saga. Chelsea was a cat, if you couldn't tell. :)

It was funny watching Chelsea play this game. It was surprising to watch her walk over to the holes instead of throwing it, like the other kids. She's got a good throwing arm, and probably would have done well tossing it. Oh well. She still got to choose a prize. :)

Pumpkin Patch

Let's pick out a pumpkin! We didn't want one already picked, we wanted to search on out in the patch!

Here is Chelsea enjoying the wagon ride to the pumpkin patch over at Valley Vegetable. There wasn't much in the patch itself, being so late in the season (the week before Halloween) but we had a great time still.

Mommy is holding Chelsea's hand to
a) keep both of their hands warm, and to
b) keep Chelsea from falling out of the wagon.
The roads were pretty bumpy!

We wised up on the way back from the patch and put little gloves on the little hands. She loved it! She kept them on for quite some time, even after they were no longer needed. Notice the wagon is still empty. We ended up picking one from the hay display anyway! :)