The End of Anna's Reign

This may very well be the last blog featuring Anna as the lead story. With baby Jack's arrival right around the corner, our little girl's reign is about to end. Given that Josh and I are both first borns, we can partially relate to this process of dethronement and believe it's for the best! Anyways, over the past few weeks, we've been enjoying all the traditional holiday activities as much as my extremely pregnant and uncomfortable state will allow. Anna was a huge help in the kitchen this year, dutifully unwrapping Hershey's kisses for the PB Kiss cookies, carefully sprinkling the sugar star cookies, and painstakingly sampling one of every kind of cookie that came out of the oven. For the first time in J & L Heebner family history, we got to celebrate Christmas at our own house in RI. Last night we went to the Christmas eve service (and struggled to keep Anna still through an entire 30 minutes of overheated pageantry) and then this morning, we had breakfast & gift opening with Mom-Mom, Dad-Dad and Uncle Dave who came into town to celebrate with us.

On the whole, Anna was sort of overwhelmed by all the gifts and seemed partially irritated by the never ending unwrapping process. (With so many fun things to play with, why would she want to keep unwrapping?). Her favorite gift was the box of princess shoes that Uncle Dave got her, followed by the Belle dress from mom-mom and dad-dad. Another close runner up (strangely enough) was the ironing board and iron that Josh and I picked out. She's currently ironing a pair of her underwear while wearing the Belle dress and plastic high heels...

Beginning of the Holidays

It took some serious convincing, but eventually Josh (always the salesman) persuaded me to stop in NYC on our way down to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving so we could take Anna to FAO Schwartz and World of Disney. Figuring it might be our last chance to do anything like that for a while (thanks to the immanent arrival of baby Jack), I gave in. I'm not sure Anna will remember any of it, but we definitely had fun watching her check everything out. At FAO they had an entire corridor devoted to princess wear which practically gave her a toddler heart attack. She was also super impressed with the Barbie fashion runway. Such a girl!

Our Thanksgiving trip turned into a bit of a whirlwind, as usual, but we did get a chance to catch up with a few friends, even if it was only for an hour or two. I snapped this cute photo of Anna and Eowyn playing together. I still can't believe how well they get along... very little "mine, mine, mine" when the two of them get together. (Maybe that's because Anna knows that her good behavior will be rewarded with Aunt Lissa's insanely rich homemade chocolate cookies?).

Since we got back, we've managed to get the whole house decorated for Christmas and our Christmas cards might actually make it into the mail before week's end (fingers crossed). We also managed to make a "perfect" gingerbread house at the annual gingerbread party. This was the first year Anna could really participate in the construction which forced me to relinquish my type-A tendencies and allow her to slap anything anywhere she wanted. Josh is now in the process of slowly eating all the chocolate pieces off our confectionery creation. Not sure that was the idea, but whatever.