The girls were at their 1/3 of a year marker yesterday and today with Natalie 3y4m and Jasmine 1y4m. They are both growing up so fast that it is hard to keep track of all the changes. Jasmine continues to add new words to her vocabulary although “No” and “Stop” seem to be her favourite. She loves to sing and dance along with the music and is quite good at both. Natalie’s memory and extroversion continue to surprise us. Just the other day Christina was paying for her groceries and had forgotten all about buying stamps, but Natalie remembered and took the initiative to politely ask the cashier, “Do you sell stamps?”.

We’ve been very busy over the past few weeks packing up our house. Since we’re going to be moving to a smaller temporary place until the house is built, only a small subset of our belongings are coming with us and the rest is going to storage. It’s been quite a task finding time to pack with two small children and a very busy work schedule, but we’ve managed to pull it off and are just getting the last few items packed before our move on Tuesday. Thankfully our temporary accommodations are just down the block so we don’t have to change much else in our life for now. We are very eager to get the move over with so that we can focus on Christmas.

The girls are still enjoying all their programs although some are wrapping up for the year. Natalie had her ballet dance recital on Friday and I took off that end of the day to watch. It was very cute and she did a great job. Great work Natalie! Both the girls are still in their swimming lessons and doing wonderfully. Jasmine and I swim together, while Natalie swims with just the instructor now.

We continue to monitor progress on our new house, and visited it again just this Saturday. They have finished most of the foundation now and should be filling the dirt back in soon. It’s exciting to see it take shape, and we can’t wait for them to start on the main floor! We may not be able to visit again until after Christmas, so we’re hoping to see lots of progress by then.

The girls have a toy mailbox that we store behind a chair in the living room when it’s not in use. The girls can still get to it and Jasmine has made a habit out of playing with it back there, probably because it is away from Natalie. We’d never really given it too much thought, but today I looked back there when she’d gone to play with it and found her holding three different socks and noticed another sock spilling out of the mailbox. When I pulled it out I found the mailbox stuffed FULL of socks. We’d been starting to notice that a number the girls’ socks seemed to be missing, but didn’t realize just how many. She must have been stashing them there for weeks. Who knows what else we’ll find as we start packing up the house!

The construction on our new house has finally begun! We can no longer say it is not even a hole in the ground as it is now just that! We’re very excited to see that construction has begun and are looking forward to visiting regularly to watch it develop.