Happy New Year and Showing Off the Christmas Loot

We are excited for the new year. Snoopy was just excited to gnaw on his ham bone leftover from Christmas dinner.

Here's Karina being silly.

One of Karina's favorite Christmas presents (to go along with her play kitchen and train set) was this vacuum that my parents got her.  She has fun helping to keep the floor clean (something we are all too willing to encourage).

Lydia was full of smiles in one of her new outfits that Grandma got her.

Since the last post didn't have any pictures of me, here I am with our two cuties.

This dress from Mormor is really pretty.  So's the girl wearing it.

On New Year's Eve, Tanja and the girls went to the library for a "Noon Year's Eve" party that supposedly had the place rocking and counting down the seconds until 12 PM on December 31.  I guess it's a good way to celebrate a new year with little kids.  They had an apple juice toast and everything.  Here are the girls with the silly party hats they made.

With a new month and a new year came the time to do a thorough vacuum of the whole house.  Karina was extremely excited that she got to join in and help out.  She has also taken her vacuum out a few more times in the last few days to touch up some spots.  Thanks, Grandma and Grandpa!

We had 3-4 inches of heavy snowfall Thursday night.  Karina was very happy to go outside and enjoy it, and she loves playing in the snow during daylight hours even more.  She endured some strong winds and very cold temperatures yesterday morning to come out and toss the snow in the air and run around.

In other news, Karina is completely daytime potty trained.  She made it through three hours of church last week without an accident and told her nursery leaders when she needed to go so they could come find us.  She does great when we are out on errands and announces if we need to find a potty in the store.  She still wears diapers at night and occasionally during her naps, but we are ecstatic at the progress (and the hidden raise not buying diapers will be for our budget).  It's kind of funny how light our garbage is and how we don't need to empty the diaper pail multiple times per week now.

Lydia is the proud owner of three teeth now (with the fourth ready to emerge).  She seems to be ahead of the curve on the teeth - her two bottom teeth came in at 4 months (average is between 6 and 10 months).  The next teeth to show up are supposed to be the upper central incisors, i.e. her two top front teeth.  However, Lydia decided she is ahead of the curve, and her third tooth and soon to be fourth tooth are her upper lateral incisors (on either side of the two top middle teeth) and they don't normally show up until between 9 and 13 months.  If it continues like this, we might end up with some funny pictures of her in the near future since she'll have her upper lateral incisors, but NOT her front center teeth.  Silly girl:-)

Lydia is also enjoying food (she devoured the 5-layer dip from my sample at Costco this morning).  I think she's just excited to be part of the action at meal time; I don't honestly know that very much actually ends up being swallowed.  She should be crawling soon as well.  Heaven help us.

Before we get too far removed from Christmas, we have to show off this beautiful felt applique stocking that Tanja made for Lydia.  She worked very hard on it the first part of December in order to have it ready for Christmas and she got it done.  I think it looks great!

Here it is hanging on our mantle in between my stocking and Karina's stocking (both of which were also made by Tanja).  Nice work!