Since it has been so long since we posted regularly I can’t possibly cover everything, but I thought I’d share a few highlights.
Justin had his first Christmas and it was a great one. We had Christina’s entire family here and my parent’s as well. It was a full house, but thankfully we had room for everyone. We also had our first good snowfalls this winter in our new house and the girls had lots of fun building snowmen and making snow angels.
Natalie started skating lessons in January for the first time.
She did a great job and by the end she was able to move around the ice very well and get up herself if she fell. She continues to enjoy her Power Hour swimming lessons and feels at home in the water.
We’re really enjoying watching Jasmine develop her own personality. Jasmine’s verbal skills have grown significantly, and she has really started to express herself. She loves to tell us all kinds of stories and especially loves singing and dancing. You never know what is going to come out of her mouth these days. Just the other day when the optometrist asked her how she was, she said, “I have a really great life.” 
Being a two year-old though she does have her difficult days. In January, she had a particularly bad weekend. On Friday, I wasn’t home for more than a minute — I hadn’t even taken off my shoes yet — before I had to pack her up and wait for a couple of hours in the emergency room to get a bead extracted from her nose. If that wasn’t enough on Sunday she managed to get a motorized, toy hamster stuck in her hair and I spent a good half an hour untangling her hair from its little wheel axles.
At the end of February, we went on vacation to Maui with the whole family and both sets of grandparents. It was a bit of a bumpy start as everyone in our family took turns getting a horrible 24-hour flu just days before we left and Natalie was recovering on her first few days of the trip. It didn’t take long for the sickness to be a distant memory as we spent day after day relaxing on the beach, boogie boarding, and eating gourmet icecream. We didn’t do as much sightseeing this time as our previous trips, but still managed to visit the Maui Ocean Center and Nakelele’s Blowhole, watch the sunset from the summit of Haleakala, attend a Luao, watch the surfers at Ho’okipa, and explore the quaint towns of Makawao and Paiea. While we were in Maui Justin tried his first solid food, some fresh Hawaiian avocado, and he loved it. 
Christina has been training for the Vancouver Half-Marathon in May, and we still managed to keep up the schedule despite being on vacation. We enjoyed spending some nice time together, even it was running 6 miles at a time! The girls went boogie boarding for the first time and had a blast. Both of them enjoyed riding the waves with us and just hanging out in the water. It looks like we have some future surfer girls in the family. The only big downside of the whole trip was that I lost my wedding band boogie boarding at Polo beach. At least I was having fun at the time.
A few weeks ago, shortly after we got back from vacation, we had a nasty surprise — several inches of water in our furnace room. 
The water had backed up from the street and flooded the basements of four homes on our street, including ours. Thankfully the damage was relatively limited, but still required tearing out the carpet and some drywall in a couple of rooms and a week of strangers and restoration equipment in the basement. The insurance is covering everything, but it will still be at least a month before it is back to normal. The construction is expected to be only a week, but the paperwork can take a while.
Breaking News… Justin got his first tooth today on his bottom left! Also, he is 15.5 lbs.
