Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! Things have been so busy, I've been getting behind on the updates! I'm trying a new format: send an update every two weeks, and post pictures online to the website when there's no update so there's something to look at every week. As always, I also post a couple of extra photos online when I post an update. We'll see how that goes! Hopefully once everything gets settled, I'll ramp back up to an update every week.

Christmas was great! He met Santa a couple of times (warily) and loves to hear us sing Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. We put the presents under the tree the day before to minimize "exploring" by Thomas. He didn't seem that interested in them in general but kept picking up one particular present and trying to open it. I suspect that Grandpa told him it was for him, piquing his interest! All in all, he did a great job of waiting until after Mom and Dad came over and we all had breakfast before attacking the presents. I would hand a present to someone and he would run over and rip off all the paper. Distracting him with his own presents didn't keep him away from everyone else's presents! It was a lot of fun to see! Things rolled merrily along until he opened up his present from "Auntie" Rose and "Auntie" Pam: a 6-car wooden train with about 50 blocks that stack onto it. Then all present-opening stopped and he became engrossed with the train. Putting him down for a nap was a challenge because we had to get him away from the train first! We even put off giving him his last present (a tricycle from Mom and Dad) so as not to disturb his concentration!

He's had a word explosion in the past two or three weeks: he learns new words everyday and can string two to four words together. I even hear him using possessive form: "Daddy's banana," "Baba's soup." He calls one of his hats the "toot-toot hat" because I told him it was his train hat to get him to wear it. Sometimes he says things like "Eat-eat? Apple juice? Tom-Tom?" and place his hand on his chest. He calls himself Tom-Tom because that is one of our nicknames for him! This morning he bumped his head on the couch and Matthew asked if he wanted Daddy to kiss it for him. Through the tears I heard, "Yes, please!" Usually he has to be prompted to use the P-word! He's only just now started to say the word "yes"-- until now he's been nodding or "m-hmm" or "oh yeah!" for yes. He learned that from one of the CDs we listen to in the car! On that same CD there's a song to the tune of "Revel" (the trumpet waking up the troops in the morning) where the lyrics for the first verse is "No no no no no no no" and the lyrics for the second verse is "Yes yes yes yes yes yes." When he requests the song, he says "nonono yesyesyes?" He also has just started saying "hi" and "bye-bye!" with a big wave.

Sophia is growing and growing. We call her "Miss Eye Contact" because she spends so much time gazing earnestly at us. Her hair is getting thinner on top, just like Thomas when he was that age. We've discovered that she likes to suck on a pacifier right before she falls asleep or when she's really fussy, and it's really great for us ... now to use that information for good and not for evil! The challenge will be to give her the pacifier only occasionally, when she really needs it. I think that will be hard! In related news, last night she went about five and a half hours between feedings! This means that I onlyget up once in the middle of the night to feed her. It's great! She's still kind of wonky with her awake times, so I'm very excited when I can feed her in the middle of the night and then immediately put her down, knowing that she's going to fall right back to sleep instead of being awake for an hour at five in the morning. We're making progress though! For the past few days I have actually gotten up with Matthew and Thomas at seven in the morning because I got enough sleep at night! This is perfect because Matthew is leaving for his trip on Monday. We had him for a month and a half!! Yay, parental leave! I'm not looking forward to figuring out the logistics of handling two kids by myself, but Mom and Dad are here, thank goodness. And on Thursday, Michelle, John and Dominic are coming for a few days on their way to their Disney cruise! Yaaaaaaay! So looking forward to it!!

Congratulations on a new year! May 2010 be even better than the ones before it!