Merry Christmas! Tomorrow we head north of the river to see more cousins! We can hardly wait. Today was the boy cousins, and tomorrow will be the girl cousins. KD and Liberty are the pivot cousins in the equation (the only matched set). Kolbe is loving his new room upstairs, and is currently sharing it with Aunt Janelle home on leave. Liberty has moved to Kolbe's old room, in preparation for further separation. When she's ready, she'll move to a big girl bed, and then up to her new room with KD. It is so nice to be able to talk in bed again. The upstairs is about 93% complete, thanks to a lot of great volunteer work. The office space is coming together, as is the crafts corner of it. We are super excited. Things are truly falling into place. Merry Christmas to all!

Happy Saint Nicholas Day!

The kids put out their shoes first thing this morning and St. Nick filled them. Kolbe got a few more pieces to his train set and Libby got a booster seat. Both kids got some treats. Kolbe wondered where his bug vacuum was. We got his friend Matthew a bug vacuum for his birthday back in October and since then Kolbe has had his heart set on a bug vacuum for Christmas.

Libby is doing pretty well sitting in her new booster, she'd been coveting his and trying to climb up into it. I can't remember when he stopped using a high chair.

These two kiddos are really fun to be around. Kolbe keeps us on our toes with his insights. Just tonight he put something down the heat register and I warned him that he could break our heater by doing that and we would get cold. He responded that we could cover up with blankets. I told him we would still be cold. He replied "Then we will cover up with heavier blankets."

Libby is not verbal like Kolbe was at her age, but she has her ways of getting her point across. If Kolbe is getting in trouble she will stand behind us and shake her finger "no, no" at him. In fact we were at Jeff's folks house last weekend and whenever the dog barked Libby looked in his direction and wagged her finger at him.

Kolbe has been such a sport about helping Libby form words. He practices all of the techniques we learn to help her.

Libby suprised us yesterday by walking on her tippy-toes. She looks so cute doing it, like she is sneeking around. It is amazing to watch the kids change and do new exciting things seemingly daily. It is easy to take it for granted with her, especially since she is number two, but I love that Kolbe and Libby are both uniquely different. He has always been pretty verbal and she has always been pretty physical-exceptional at fine and gross motor skills. We keep thinking she will do what family members say Jeff did as a toddler, staying fairly quiet until he had something he wanted to say one day and spoke in sentences. She waited until Jeff got home on leave to start walking and within a week of walking was walking backwards, spinning, and climbing. It was like the floodgates were opened. :)

Libby is doing pretty well with using her little potty chair. She can't communicate a NEED to go potty, but virtually every time I put her on the potty, she uses it. She's had several dry days, but has not gone #2 on the potty since Jeff has been back home. She'd been doing pretty well before he got home back in October, but for the first couple of weeks after his return would not use it at all. I remember thinking when Jeff left for his deployment that Kolbe would hopefully be potty trained by the time he got back home, and that was such a big under-taking, but Kolbe was pretty easy. He announced to me one day that if I put that diaper on him he was going to take it off, so I didn't put him in diapers after that. Luckily he had relatively few accidents.

We'll try to post some pics of the kids soon! :)