Festivities

Sorry, the camera was misplaced once again. This time for much of the Christmas break. These are the photos we did manage to get, and we'll try to post pictures from other family's cameras when we get the chance.

Reese playing with the moving, singing snowmen at Grandma Faber's house.

Reese found the phone in Grandma and Grandpa Faber's room.

Reese playing with cousins at Grandma and Grandpa Heath's house.

Reese not waking up from a nap after not falling asleep very easily. Notice the ring on her arm. I don't think the toy was meant for that.

Reese trying to blog since mom has been out of commission.

We stayed in Utah Valley for the week of Christmas and New Years. Here are some of the highlights:

Christmas Eve: Reese and cousins act out the Christmas story at Grandma and Grandpa Heath's house. Reese loves being a wise man because she gets to wear a Burger King crown and hold the bad of gold.

Christmas Day: We open gifts at the Heath's. We try to show Reese how to tear wrapping paper, but she takes one try and hands it to the nearest adult and asks them to finish by using the ASL for "please" I figure it's just as well. I don't really want her learning it's okay to rip all sorts of paper until she's old enough to know the difference between the mail and the presents.

Will gets shoes. Anna gets another wig. Will likes dry feet and Anna likes not having to do her hair. Reese gets Duplo blocks. They are currently scattered in every single room of our apartment.

Christmas Day: Anna runs to her parent's house in the middle of the day to be there for her brother Darren's Christmas phone call from Canada. She brings the camera back with her to take pictures at the Heath's and that's the last we remember of the camera until the end of the holidays.

All Week: Reese makes messes everywhere and charms everyone. She loves having so much space.

All Week: we all get to play games with family. We learn a new game called "beananza" where players grow bean fields to win. Will has a nightmare the next morning where he believes that he can't wake up until he has enough of the right beans. Anna thought he was just extra tired.

New Years: We rang in the new years at 8:00 with the Heaths (and cousins) then return to the Faber's to put Reese to bed and continue playing games with Family until it's so late we're all tired and grumpy.

Going Home: We've finished packing up the car to go home with I realize there is one pocked of a bag we have not checked. Sure enough, there's the camera.

Happy Holidays!

First Words

For the record, Reese's first word was "hi." She uses it all the time. She used to walk down the halls of the institute building with me and wave and say "hi" to anyone and everyone. I think she made a lot of people's day.

She also frequently nods her head and says "yeah" when we ask her a question. "Reese, are you the cutest girl in the world?"- "yeah." She doesn't always- or even most of the time- know what we're saying, but I think she likes to feel included in the conversation, anyway.

She also says "mama" and "dada" but she doesn't know what they really mean, so it doesn't count. We play the game where we point to Daddy and say "dada" and then point to Mamma and say "mama" and then we point to Reese and say "Reesey". But it hasn't worked out the greatest. She thinks "mama" means "nose" because I usually point to my nose when I say it. I think she's catching on to dada, but once, when we said "where's Reesey?" instead of pointing to herself she covered her eyes because that's what we say in our version of peek-a-boo. So so far we don't count names as words.

Despite all the effort to get her to say our names, she caught on very quick yesterday when she was in the bath tub with her rubber ducky and I pointed to it and said "duck." I said "a duck says: quack quack quack quack." She repeated, "quack quack quack quack," and I was pretty excited so we kept saying "duck" and "quack" and she caught on. Today she even grabbed the duck and said "duck."

So officially: Hi, Yeah, Duck.

The Power Strip Phone

Daddy's Little Boy - er - Girl

Daddy had to wear a suit to school for a presentation. Reese saw him picking out a tie and decided that she had to do the same thing. She was quite happy with herself.

Phoning- The Series

Reese likes to pretend that she's on the phone. She even has conversations and answers the imaginary person at the other end. It's fun to see all the things that she pretends are phones, so I've decided to try and capture as many as I can. I'll post them as they happen. I have two for you from this past week:

The Shoe Phone

The Comb Phone

Jazz Game

Megan and Todd were nice enough to invite us to their work Christmas party. Each employee is aloud to bring a guest with the idea that they'll bring a spouse or family member, but since they both work there, they each had an extra ticket to the box seats at the Jazz game courtesy "Spiral Interventions" as the signs on the doors said. Reese got to come, too.

Reese enjoyed the food and being with adoring aunts (Megan pictured), more than one of which was there.

With Aunt Kenzie watching the game. We got to go down at halftime and give high-fives to players as they re-entered the court.

We also got Free T-shirts. The only size was XL, but that didn't stop us from putting one on Reese, too.

Will, having a good time.

Reese, having a good time.

Christmas Shopping

I was at the mall with Reese and for the first time ever I found myself needing to use a public bathroom and bring her with me. I purposely chose the handicapped stall because I had my big stroller with me, even though it held our coats while Reese was happily walking and exploring. When I tried to latch the door, I found that the lock was broken. No matter, I thought, there was no one else in the bathroom and I could just pull the stroller in front of the door to keep it closed.

Unfortunately, this dilemma took two seconds too long. Just as I was pulling the stroller to block the door, I heard a 'splash splash.' Reese! Get your hands out of the toilet!

Thanksgiving

Sorry about the lack of Thanksgiving information. I was in charge of the dinner this year at my mom's house and it was great- thanks to the help of my wonderful sister, Megan and her hubby, Todd. I didn't get any pictures because I lost my camera before the event, but here are some of my favorite things:

- We combined two tables together to form one huge long table to seat 18 people.
- We had to use two tablecloths- one fall leaves and one plain red. Then we had red plates, blue bowls and white napkins. We had to change out the blue bowls for white ones so the settings looked more Thanksgiving than Independence Day.
-we had orange leaf-shaped place cards that we set in the glasses. It helped the red and white table look a lot more festive.
- We had two turkeys. Todd was in charge of the turkey, but I defrosted a second one by accident, so I ended up cooking a bird, too. It's a good thing we have three ovens between my mom and Megan's houses.
- Half the yams didn't get done, and the other half were only done halfway through dinner. I gave the whole bowl to Shelly because she was emphasising how much she loves yams.
- Reese would have nothing to do with anything except the jell-o.
- Other than the yams, the dinner was a huge success! Thanks to those who helped and those who brought extras!

And here's a video of Will and Reese playing the cover-my-face game, just because I don't have any more pictures.

Oh, PS: I still can't find my camera. Would you keep a look out for it, Mom?

Cute Things Part Two

While we were at our neighborhood community room doing some activity, Reese decided to sit at the kid table, even though there was no one else sitting there or even around there. I think she just wanted to feel like a big girl by getting in the chair all by herself.

She discovered my clock radio, which will play music at the touch of a button. She danced for about ten minutes.

Cute Things Part One

Reese does cute things. Here are some of them.

She inhaled this banana.

She almost wouldn't let Will have it back.

She helped me make pie dough.

She helped me by swishing around flour and eating the leftover fats before I cleaned them up.

Cutest Baby In The World

I think I've posted pictures in an earlier blog with Reese covering her head with a blanked and running around to play peek-a-boo. Well, it finally got to her when she ran right in to a kitchen chair and got a huge goose egg. Luckily the swelling only lasted one day.

Reese doesn't like dirty hands and picks out her own toe jam.

On a visit to Utah Valley this past weekend, Reese got to play the piano at Grandma and Grandpa Heath's house.

We got rear-ended on the way home. It felt pretty bad at the time, but this is what we saw when we got out to check the damage. We had said a prayer to ask for protection on the way home because the weather was bad, and I think God listened.

This picture is a little blurry, but I like it, so I posted it.

Oh yeah, and we're having another baby, probably in July. I worry because I'm pretty sure I already have the cutest girl in the world, how can another baby stand a chance?

Play Date

Reese had a friend come over to play today. I loved it. They played happily in the living room and I got the dishwasher unloaded and then loaded again with minimal baby interference. Reese's friends name is Kat, and she often goes by "Kit Kat" at home. Her mom likes to joke that "the Heath's are taking Reese's Pieces and Kit Kat to play".

Every once in a while they fought over a toy, but I'm just glad I have two kitchen stools, or there would have been some major pulling, pushing and screaming- Reese loves to sit on the kitchen stool and Kat wouldn't give it up when she found how fun it is.

Thief

Does your one-year-old hold her pen like this? What happened to the entire fist-grip? I don't know where she got it from.

We had tithing settlement with our bishop yesterday. Reese stole the magnetic paperclip holder from his desk. He said it was okay, but I'm not always happy about extra stuff at our home. Paperclips all over the floor.

Lost a paperclip

Talking to the paperclip holder

Halloween

We were WAY lazy and uncreative for Halloween this year.

We didn't go trick-or-treating, and we saved the candy from some parties to pass out to other kids instead of buying our own when we heard our complex get hardly any trick-or-treaters.

We pulled out some old accessories from my mom's attic to make Reese a "rodeo princess" and Will her "cowboy coach"

I recycled last year's costume (click here for a reminder) to be Reese's rodeo steed. I know, she looks way excited about it.

We had a pumpkin painting contest at our church Halloween party. This one won. the plate in front of it is pumpkin guts that apparently have been thrown up by the pumpkin- a nod to the H1N1.

Our entry was another reminder of last year's much more creative costume, the headless horseman.

At our student housing association party. Will isn't really dressed up as anything, he just wanted to keep is robe on and figured people would just assume they didn't understand the costume. I didn't even bother to try (we didn't remember about the party until after it started.)

We were also lazy with Reese. We figured if we drew some stripes on her face, people would figure that she at one point must have had a costume on, but it just didn't last. Hm. I take it back, we're way creative.

Happy Halloween!

Around The House

Reese likes to help around the house. Some things she is very helpful at are: emptying the dishwasher (onto the floor), closing the dishwasher, sweeping (pictured), picking up clutter (and moving it around), and generally boosting morale.

I tried to think of something we might have around the house that we could stack up into a tower, when I realized we had just got a bulk purchase of tissue boxes. At first she had no interest, then she helped me stack, then, when I had knocked the tower over a couple of times ad she realized she could do it herself, wouldn't even let one box stand upright by itself.

We also let her play with the box from her new winter boots.

Unfortunately it's another case of the "drop what I'm doing so I can stare at the camera"s

I took the ingenious idea from another blogger and let Reese explore flour. She always watches me roll out dough and wants to help, and letting her play with just the flour was great.

Not a whole lot of excitement- this one's for you, Ellie.

Quirks

Last week, right before leaving for Bear Lake, we spent a bunch of time searching for one of Reese's sneakers. We looked everywhere but couldn't find it. Eventually we gave up and put her Church shoes on instead. While we were up at the apartment at Bear lake, we noticed that she kept opening all the drawers and cupboards. Hmmm. Sure enough, when we got home, we found her lost shoe in her dresser where we keep the diapering stuff. It's become a new hobby of Reese's: getting into all sorts of stuff she couldn't before (and doesn't realize we liked it that way.)

Yesterday I was working on some computer things (our computer is in her room) and she kept opening a cupboard in her dresser and pulling out diapers. I told her repeatedly not to do so and helped her put the diapers back and close the door, but as soon as I had my back turned, there she would go again. Today I found her in the closet, stuck in her shoe bin. (Will had a hard time finding her in this picture, it's like a where's Waldo)

She especially likes playing with shoes, which is something that she could do before, because we have a shoe rack out right by the front door. This is her in Daddy's sneakers.

And I finally found a way to get her to keep headbands in her hair for more than 3 seconds: let her put the hairband on all by herself.

And she still hates it that I try to ignore her when I'm cooking.

Trip To Bear Lake

Last week, Will's sisters, Becky and Christine, graciously invited us to share in their vacation at a timeshare at Bear Lake. It was three days of fun.

Reese Behaved herself pretty well, but she had to re-warm up to her aunts every morning. You'd think she'd remember from the day before that they're nice people.

One evening, she put a cloth on her head and ran around from person to person playing peek-a-boo. She only ran into the all once, and unfortunately I had just turned off the video right before it happened. (video below)

We went on a hike to some freshwater springs in Paris, Idaho. The springs were gorgeous, and it was pretty cool to see the water just come up out of the ground like that.

On the Hike

The springs.

The gang in front of Bear Lake. It was late enough in the season that we couldn't do any lake swimming, but the beach was exclusively ours.

Will and Reese on the lake front

Becky and Christine collecting some of the tons of tiny seashells for a future project.

Yes, I was there too.

Thanks for a wonderful time, guys!