Friday, January 29, 2016

Three Months of Change

When I realized that it had been over three months since my last post, I realized that a lot has changed in those three months!  In our day to day lives, three months just seem to fly by, but in reality there have been many changes!

Our little Jaina is no longer a baby.  We celebrated her first birthday just after Christmas!  It is just amazing how much a little one can change from one day old to one year old!



I just love watching her grow and change!  She is such a fun little girl.  Lately, Jaina has really enjoyed playing with the kid's new Toy Kitchen set.  She specifically enjoys banging pots and pans around and making tons of noise!  Jaina loves to eat just about anything that I put in front of her.  I had mentioned before that she was showing signs of some sort of dairy sensitivity.  In the past months, we have seen great improvements with that, and I am hoping that over the next few months or maybe even this year that she will fully grow out of the sensitivity!  A new favorite food of Jaina's is Goldfish!  Jaina still loves to be held, but is starting to come out of the Separation Anxiety phase that most babies tend to go through. She loves to babble lots of words and sounds, but mostly still, she just says "mama", "dada", and "nana".  She loves to climb and walk around furniture.  Just yesterday, she started to take her first steps!  The kids really enjoy watching her grow up, too!

We also celebrated Joelle's 3rd birthday, just two weeks after Jaina's.  For the past few months, Joelle would insist that when it was her birthday, she was going to be 5.  We were finally able to convince her that she was, in fact, only turning 3.  Now, her big brother has been reminding her that she get's another birthday next year!  The only problem is that Joelle thinks that she will be 3 again next year too!  Silly little girl!  Joelle has also changed so much in the past year.  Between 2 and 3, you really see your little toddler becoming a young child!

 

Over the past year, Joelle has learned so much!  Her speech has improved and she has learned hundreds of new words - they are not always used the right way or said the right way, but she is getting there!  She has grown much taller and bigger, she loves to sing and dance, and she loves to give hugs and kisses!  In fact, she gives so many hugs and kisses to her little sister, that often times, Jaina starts crawling in the other direction when Joelle comes in for a kiss!  It's too funny!

Even though it isn't Jonas's birthday, he has changed a lot too!  Our little guy is nearly 4 1/2 now, and that "1/2" really does mean so much in these years!  He continues to be one of the tallest kids in his age group.  This usually results in many people asking him why he isn't at school when we are out during the day!  Lately, we have been trying to make the difficult decision of whether or not to try to get him into Kindergarten for the 2016 school year.  In Indiana, the age cut-off is August 1st, and our boy turns 5 on the 21st.  It's close enough for us to apply for a special admittance into Kindergarten early, but we are trying to figure out if he is ready socially and emotionally to go to school.  He is a very intelligent young boy with an incredible memory, but I also don't want to start him too young if he isn't ready!  We will continue to pray about this decision, and if you feel led to do as well, we would appreciate your prayers too!

Even though it is a few months old, this is my favorite recent picture of the kids!  Needless to say, sometimes they have a hard time sitting still enough for me to snap a few photos of them!  I guess I got lucky with this one :)



With our children growing and changing over the past few months, we also have more change coming in 2016!  The kids are excited to share our news of a new little one joining us this summer!