Brance, Lauren & Haddie

Here’s another short video clip of Haddie playing in the living room. She crawls around and gives me a hug. She’s so cute.

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So tonight while Lauren was at her exercise group, I was keeping Haddie. I decided to get the camera out and tape her standing up. She’s been doing it for a while now and I hadn’t got any of it on tape. Well, what do you know! She decided to take a little step! Twice!

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Normally I would go to work today, regardless of the holiday. I usually don’t take holidays off unless their big ones, like Christmas. This morning though it was snowing so I decided to “work” from home today and spend some time with my girls.

I took a couple pictures of the snow. Then a little later I noticed Haddie playing with her doll. This is kind of new. Up till now toys were nothing more than chew things. Recently though, she’s starting to notice things for themselves and really play with her toys. I thought it was so cute to see her picking the doll up and looking at it from different angles, that I had to grab the camera and take a picture. The doll eventually ended up in her mouth, but it was cute for a couple minutes.

In addition to playing with her toys, another fairly new development is standing. She’s been standing while holding on to things for quite a while. A month ago I noticed she would sometimes let go of whatever she was holding onto, in order to fix her pacifier or something. As soon as she realized she was free-standing, she would fall. In the last week or so she’s begun to free-stand constantly, and grin about it.

Isn’t she adorable?

So Aunt Holly wanted a Christmas card with a picture of her and Haddie. We took the picture and then started designing the card. Holly was looking for a good Bible verse to use on the card. One that wasn’t overused at Christmas. I suggested Matthew 25:32

Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

Lauren suggested some possible wording to put with the verse. We mocked it up, but Holly didn’t think it was quite right, so she found a different verse. Here is the proposed card, and the one she actually sent out. I’ll let you decide which one was better.

Here are our Christmas Photos from Christmas 2008. Many of you will have received one or more of these in the mail with our Christmas letter, but a few people have asked to see them all.

We took these at my studio one afternoon. The family photo was the hard one since we had to use the timer on the camera. Without someone behind the camera to keep her attention and make her smile, we had a tough time. We finally stopped to pray about it and Lauren asked God for one good photo of Haddie. He gave us this one. It’s the only family photo in which she wasn’t making some kind of strange facial expression!