Snow day, Early Christmas for the kids, and Nathan is Potty Trained!

Time to catch up! It's been a few weeks! We are busy here, just like most everyone else at this time of year. We spent American Thanksgiving with our friends the Daveys which was nice. Who can complain about two Thanksgivings to celebrate! We put up our tree, had a snow day (Lynsey and Nathan took advantage!) and have been getting ready for Christmas! We bought our kids a train to go around the Christmas tree which has been fun. We did "Christmas" with our kids this morning because we are leaving on Friday afternoon to go back to Alberta for Christmas. It was low-key but fun, the kids are enjoying what they got! We got Lynsey a Kindle Fire tablet for Christmas (with parental controls and screen time limits, don't worry;)). Nathan got an Olaf stuffy and a car track with battery operated cars that's pretty fun, and Adam got a sensory bin that Brian designed and made from scratch - it's so great! I can't tell you how GLAD I was to get rid of the below picture rice "corner" we had (it was spread all over the house as you can imagine). I think we had success all around:). We have stockings with 3-4 small gifts for each kid that we are going to take with us to Edmonton to give them on Christmas morning, as well as some new PJs for Christmas Eve night. I feel like this has been a pretty stress-free Christmas for the most part - teacher gifts are harder for me than anything else! We leave on Friday to spend Christmas in Alberta - looking forward to it!

So as you can see from the title, we had a break through with Nathan a few weeks back! He started pooping on the potty! It was really like something just clicked and he figured it out:). I am calling him potty trained, although he can't really be relied on to actually tell you when he needs to go (in Sunday School, because he didn't know where the bathroom was to just go by himself, he pooped in his diaper instead of telling the teacher). I'm sure this last step will come soon, he just prefers to be very independent. His nights are really good but he is still in a diaper because he is still wet about once every 10 days or so. I'm sure this will taper off, but in the meantime, I don't like changing bedding in the middle of the night so a diaper it is. I don't think it has any mental effect on him, he doesn't pee in it when he wakes up ever - even if he is wet, he still has pee in the morning which means it happened during the night sometime. It's so weird how something that is SO consuming when you're in the middle of it (potty training) can seem like no big deal even a week or two after it's done. So glad this got nailed down before our Christmas trip, hopefully he doesn't regress while we're gone:-S.

Adam is getting so much better at answering questions. The other day, a swim instructor asked him how old he was, and he answered with "4". Apparently they are working on that specific question at school, but the fact that he answered it to a complete stranger was impressive! When I told him last night that he would get a present the next day, the biggest grin came over his face - I think he finally knows that presents are a good thing and something to look forward to! Today he asked Brian for help using very appropriate and non-scripted language. I feel so much hope that his language is on the road to becoming conversational! Not there yet, though.

The hat that Lynsey is wearing in the first picture is a hat that I knitted for her on a day when she was home sick and we were all pretty bored. At least her knitting loom was useful for something! She doesn't quite have the patience to follow through on a project yet, maybe when she's a bit older. Or maybe it will never be her thing, which is fine, too:).