The Heidt Family: Our Christmas Card

We're leaving for Rochester this afternoon. Have a merry Christmas everyone!

Is 2007 already over? Where did the time go? It is so hard to know where to begin - I don’t think I could begin to put everything in one short letter! So, here are the highlights from this year for each of us.

At the beginning of 2007, we welcomed our son, William August Heidt into our family. As William has accounted for many of the changes in our lives this year, we will start with him. William was born on January 26, 2007 in Chesterfield, Missouri. As expected, he turned our whole world upside down for the first few weeks. After some adjustment, we found ourselves with a laid back, sweet little boy who is intensely curious about the world around him. It is incredible when we look back how much he has already grown and learned this year. It seems like everyday he is able to do more things by himself and getting a little bit bigger. His current interests include anything he can get his hands on and learning how to walk.

John continues to work at Boeing as a structural analyst for the F-15 program and has picked up a second job with the title “Daddy”. Both of his jobs keep him busy and challenged in many ways. John has also been working hard at home with a number of different home improvement projects including finishing our basement. We are getting closer to completing this project, but work has slowed down considerably since the arrival of William. We hope to be priming and installing flooring sometime early in the new year. Hopefully by the time we write this letter next year, we can call this project done. We’ll see how that works out.

Kelly arranged to take a leave of absence from teaching this year to stay home with William. She is really enjoying being able to spend lots of time watching him grow and learn everyday. In the spring we will have to make a final decision about her going back to teaching for the following school year. No decision has been made, although lots of different possibilities have been discussed including selling the house and moving to Tahiti. Although free time is a little harder to come by, Kelly continues to find time to quilt, read, run and practice her photography skills on one of the most photographed children ever.

Our first babies, Mango and Mudd have adjusted well to our newest arrival. They both are quite tolerant of the noise and chaos William creates in their world. Both cats allow William to “pet” them while supervised, but neither seeks him out for companionship yet. They both lost a little weight since William started crawling after them, although we are quite certain neither one of them intended to become more active. Their biggest accomplishment this year is successfully finding ways to scale the unfinished wall in our basement to eat our insulation on more than one occasion.

Although we have slowed things down, we still love to travel and enjoy the outdoors together. A great deal more planning is required when adventuring with a baby, but it is still possible. William has turned out be a pretty adventurous guy as well as a flexible traveler. In just eleven months, he has traveled to six different states including a big trip to the east coast for Kelly’s cousin’s wedding in Rhode Island over Thanksgiving. We also made a trip to North Dakota this summer to visit Kelly’s Grandparent in Grand Forks and John’s relatives in the Bismarck area. There have been multiple hiking adventures locally with our hiking friends and a few on our own as well.