Sarah and Julian

Sarah and Julian. He is probably wanting to eat.  He has eaten non stop for since he arrived.  The classification he falls under is "connoisseur" when it comes to eating, takes his time and will smack his lips during dinner.  This is in stark contrast to his brother who would bolt through dinner and then want to look around as soon  as possible.

Me and the new boy

Me and the boy, he had just had his first bath, I think he was glaring :)
mmm, morning coffee,  and baby

Julian

Right before his first bath, he wasn't happy about getting Pjs taken off

Just born, sleeping with Sarah

Niko's 2nd Birthday

Getting Settled

We’ve been living in our new house for two and a half weeks now. Niko is getting more comfortable in his new bed, and falls asleep by himself without too much crying. He has slept through the night for 3 or 4 nights now, and yesterday morning he actually got up and walked into our room when he woke up at 7:15 to get me and ask for Curious George cartoons and milk.

He is working on giving me a heart attack with his crazy cycling stunts – his favorite being to scoot up steep driveways on the block and then ride down backwards. We bought a helmet last week, but getting him to wear it is difficult. Colin is on the hunt for a baby trailer so that he can tow Niko around on his bike on the trail near our house.

Niko is already starting to transition to the 2-year-old room at daycare, just a couple of weeks early! I cannot believe how big he is getting. He can drink a half gallon of milk in about 2 days! He also helps himself to crackers and cereal out of the pantry now. He thinks it is really handy that the new house has a pantry with low shelves that he can reach.

The funniest thing he has done lately was probably at daycare last week. He was refusing to wash his hands when he should have, so his teacher started to count to three. She said “one,” and Niko immediately jumped in with ”two.” I guess he just thought they were counting!
More pictures coming soon …

At Home, At Last

The past month has been an exhausting one for us. We received an offer on our house with a three week closing date, which we accepted, and began searching for a new place to call home. We are here at long last! We've found a great house in Overland Park that we moved into last weekend. It is wonderful . . . enough space for us and the boys, lots of light from south windows and a perfect location - close to work, family and lots of shopping and kid-oriented stuff.

We think Nikolai likes the new place as much as we do - he has a room with a brand new "big boy" bed and a play room in the finished basement. He has been riding his tricycle up and down the sidewalk and has a big backyard to roam. As the snow melted this afternoon, he splashed through every big puddle on the block on the trike and we had to change his pants and shoes several times to dry him out and keep him warm.

This was the first weekend in a month that we've had free time to relax, although Colin also did a bang-up job of getting us unpacked. We're looking forward to many more coffee-drinking weekend mornings in our new home!

I haven’t written an update in months! What is our little guy up to…

Talking! Niko is talking non-stop and adding new words everyday. He is starting to put together words into sentences as well. A couple of times he has communicated so clearly that I didn’t even realize he’d used a sentence. When I disconnected the trains he gave me to play with yesterday morning, he told me that the “stay like this” and put them back together. He asks “what’s this?” quite a bit. He asked “where is it” the other morning. I asked him what he was looking for, and he showed me that the bed was missing off of one of his dump trucks. I found it for him and he ran over and tried to put it back together. He is a whiz at snapping train tracks together now.

He is also a dance-machine. He sings his own version of Ring Around the Rosie and spins around, usually falling into my lap. If Colin and I are there to sing and play along, he insists that we each hold a hand and swing him around in the air.

Coloring! He is getting good with crayons. I let him play upstairs without supervision (my mistake!) while I got ready for work on Tuesday morning. I ran upstairs when I heard the shrieks of glee… Niko was standing on top of his play table. He was coloring the light switch plate with an orange crayon while flipping the light on and off and eating a sheet of stickers! Yikes! He was really upset when I made him stop!

Future hoops star – Niko can say ‘basketball’ now and points it out on tv. One of our mini basketballs has a Jayhawk on it, and last week he brought it to me and said “see a Jayhawk.” It was just about the proudest moment of my adult life! His hoop-shooting prowess is so impressive that his daycare teachers took a video of him bending his knees and following through J I believe a hoop is on the agenda for his birthday.