On the DL

It was bound to happen sooner or later. The fearless one fell off a kitchen chair and fractured her wrist, so we spent our Saturday night in the emergency room instead of in front of the Penn State game. For those of you who are counting, that's two ER visits in one month for the Heebners. Sigh. Fortunately, Hasbro Children's Hospital is right nearby, so we took her there instead of to Rhode Island Hospital. She got in right behind a seven year old boy who had "foreign object in nose". Nice. Anyways, according to Josh, it was about 100 times nicer than RIH ER, so we were super thankful.

We're Starting Her Young...

yeah, it's been a while

So, word on the street is that everyone's worried because I haven't blogged in a while. Something tells me that's more about a desire to see photos and videos of the eternally chubby one rather than a genuine concern about, say, Josh and me. Regardless, we're back and Anna's as cute as ever so you're all in luck.

Anna spent her first week away from home back at the beginning of the month. We shipped her off to the grandparents in PA so that Josh and I could get some work done around the house. We got lots of painting and cleaning done. In fact, according to the dumpster rental company, we threw out 1.63 tons of crap, most of which was lovingly left for us by the previous owners. As it turns out, cleaning out our creepy basement landed Josh in the emergency room -- or at least we think that's what did it. He got a nasty bug-bite looking thing on his leg that turned out to be some awful infection that had spread to his blood stream by the time he finally went to the emergency room. They pumped him full of antibiotics (thanks again Mr. Alexander Fleming!) and apparently he's going to live. I'm seriously considering billing the previous owners the $267 we paid for the dumpster plus $100 for the ER co-pay. Thoughts?

Once we found out Josh was going to survive, we drove down to PA to collect Anna and headed to Ocean City, NJ with my parents and brother for a week of vacation. Anna had a great time. Here are some photos from the beach:

We had a few visitors while we were in Ocean City, including Melissa and Eowyn who came down for a day. It's amazing how much the girls have grown in a year:










After the week at the shore -- and sadly saying goodbye to Uncle Dave who officially lives in CA now -- Anna and I spent a week in PA with the Kulp grandparents while Josh headed to MD for work. Here's a cute video I took of Anna dancing in a little puddle (um, of hose water, that is) at my parent's house:

Playing in the garden:

Feeding the ducks with Granddad at Penn State Ogontz:

The Pancake Grabber

The other night while I was making dinner, I looked up to find Anna carrying two big pancakes -- yes pancakes -- around the living room. It took me a second to figure out where they came from and then -- ding! -- I realized I had left them in the warming drawer earlier that morning! Whoops. As you can see in picture numero uno, Anna had helped herself to a gigantic mouthful of pancake before we discovered the crime.

In other news... we finally finished up another house project. We converted a window seat into a TV, um, nook (great word!). I was a little hesitant to close the windows up and lose the extra sunlight, but I think it was definitely the right decision for the room. Here are the before & after shots:

Should I be concerned about how much Anna seems to like the new TV?

And finally... here's a few pictures we took while we were in Boston this weekend. Josh's friend Peter came to visit, so we had to take him to his old stompin' grounds (M.I.T. grad). We had lunch at Quincy Market and wandered around Boston Commons during the afternoon. Anna had fun chasing pigeons until a homeless guy threw a sandwich at her. (No lie)

Stomping the Divots

Saturday was beautiful here in RI so we spent the afternoon at the polo match in Portsmouth with a bunch of people from Josh's work. You're allowed to pull your car up near the field and tailgate as long as you want before and after the match -- fun! We sort of half watched USA defeat Jamacia, but were primarily focused on Anna (what else is new?) and eating (ditto)! Anna wandered around saying hi to all the spectators and making herself at home with anyone who had good toys. Here are some other highlights:

Stomping the divots with mommy

A rare family photo (of course someone had to close their eyes!)

Josh doing one of his favorite things -- grilling tubular meat product

Anna hanging out with her buddy Hadley

The two sides of Anna: 1) double fisting 2) studying intently (she's definitely ours!)

Gank Yee (i.e. Thank You)

Just when I think she's 100% Josh, she goes and picks up her purse and pretends to chat on her Barbie phone, reminding me that she's definitely my little girly girl. Whoa!


On the other hand, there's this photo... I opened up the bottom kitchen drawer to let her play while I was making dinner and she managed to dig out this Arizona momento shot glass that I didn't even know we owned. Sigh.

In the past couple weeks, Anna's picked up about 25 new words. It's as if she just woke up one day and realized she could talk. "Melmo" (Elmo), "bauba" (bubble), "watt" (water),"eye-knee" (henie)... the list suddnely goes on and on. My favorite though, is her attempt at saying "thank you":

OBX, Paris Hilton, and Kisses for Everyone

It's hard to believe it's been almost a month since the last blog post. We just got back from our trip to the Outer Banks. We stopped in Phila on the way down and stayed two nights at Josh's parents house. While we were there, I snapped this photo of Anna petting a little bunny that we found in the yard. Her gentle pats quickly turned to violent wacks, so we had to tuck Mr. Bundersen back into his hole moments after this photo was taken.

I didn't take quite as many pictures as I might have liked while we were on vacation, but I did managed to catch this one cute photo. Anna wasn't quite sure what to make of the NC beach, but she definitely had fun at the pool and at the house playing with her Grandmom and Grandpop, and her "cousins" Erik, Leah, and Becca. Her favorite thing about vacation? Fruit Loops.

While we were in NC, we drove out to see the giant sand dunes and Josh took the "running down the giant mound of sand" challenge, nearly giving me a heart attack in the process. I was pretty sure he was gonna break his leg. I caught the moment on camera:

So we're back to the regular routine this week. This morning I nearly died laughing when Anna pointed to a photo of Paris Hilton on the computer and yelled "Maaa meee!" Just a few minutes later though, a photo of Tom Cruise popped up and she yelled "Daaa deee", so I guess there's truly some distorted perception there. She also cracked me up when I caught her climbing into her bin of toys. I had to run for the camera.