18 Month and Holiday Pictures

I find it hard to believe that my baby is about to be 18 months old! A couple of weeks ago we went and got her 18 month/holiday pictures taken. Here she is in her Christmas outfit.

The bear in the picture was given to Audrey by her cousin Stacey. This bear has become her favorite animal and she carries him around the house and sleeps with him. When Audrey was tiny Matt figured out that he could make her stop crying when he changed her diaper if he did a big fake sneeze. For some reason that made her laugh. One day a couple of months ago her bear was nearby so Matt made the bear sneeze. (I think Audrey was sick at the time too.) Ever since then her brown bear has been known as "A-chooo bear." If you ask her what a bear says, she will say, "Aaaa-chooo." Not just, "a-choo," but, "aaaa-chooo." So we had to have him in a picture with her.

Yes, yet again we have a crying picture. Notice all the tears? While we were waiting to get pictures taken Audrey grabbed onto the basket of the stroller and started pushing it around. Matt held onto the handle so she wouldn't ram it into anything and they walked all around the store like that. When it was time for pictures she was reluctant to stop playing "choo-choo," but she did and actually did pretty well for the Christmas background. But when we swiched to the black background she decided she had had enough. She wanted to play choo-choo and was very upset when we didn't let her. Thus the crying picture.

Just in the nick of time

Yesterday Matt and I finally went and bought Audrey a good, warm winter coat. She has lots of jackets and light coats, but nothing really warm. We've been looking for awhile but couldn't find one we liked that didn't cost too much. Yesterday at BabyGap we finally found one. This morning we woke up to this view from our windows.

Needless to say, Audrey's new coat was put to good use today. Church was cancelled so we had a big family breakfast and then went outside to enjoy the snow.

Audrey loved it! She stayed outside for an hour and even then Matt had to drag her back inside.

She had a great time just trudging through the snow and wiping it off of the bench in the front yard...

and off the cars.

We eventually put another hat on her underneath her coat hood. I think it's so cute how it squishes her cheeks!

On a completely unrelated topic, last week Macy brought her chair into the family room where we keep Audrey's. A few minutes later I looked in and found this.

They were so cute and were being so funny. I was cracking up! This is the stuff I love about being a mom.

Ho Ho!

Last weekend Audrey got to go see Santa. We were worried that she might cry or refuse to sit on his lap, but she did very well. We couldn't really get her to smile of course, and her hair looks like she has weird short bangs (she doesn't), but at least we got our picture!

In reference to the title of this post, if you ask Audrey what Santa says, she will respond, "Ho ho."