Christmas with the Kurby's

On Saturday we had our annual Christmas celebration and exchanging of gifts with Uncle Phil and Aunt Sandy (and Joey of course). Abbey was super excited for her friend Joey to come over, so here she is all ready (and wearing pig tails for the first time)!

Juliette got to spend some quality time with her Godmother...

All the kids love playing with Uncle Phil and Joey enjoyed driving the train with Paul...

Uncle Phil and Aunt Sandy show they are more than ready to handle another child!

We had a great time and can't wait to see you again soon...with Jillian!!

Abbey is 17 months!

I thought I would just take a moment to update you on how Abbey is doing lately. She is 17 months now going on 2. She is quite the handful! She is very independent and just wants to run around, which means when we take her places it is a full time job of one of us to keep an eye on her and chase after her because she will just take off without warning! She is also in the stage of pulling everything down from shelves so keeping the house picked up is impossible. Although tiring, it is such a fun stage she is going through and you can see her learning so much everyday. She says new words everyday and is putting several words together too. Not making sentences yet, but putting words together to get ideas across. She is adjusting well to Juliette, but she does want to be held constantly, especially if Juliette is crying! Her interaction with Juliette is limited to pointing out her features (nose, hair, etc.), taking her socks off, and buckling her into her swing or bouncy seat (Abbey loves to buckle things). She calls her JuJu, so we have all taken to calling her that as well. She adores Ben and wants to do whatever he is doing. Although she is not shy about making a fuss if he takes her toy or bothers her when she is not in the mood to play. You can see she wants to play with the big kids (Ben and his friends) and is fearless when it comes to trying new things. She will probably be our trouble-maker, but for now we just chalk it up to her experiencing new things and being adventuresome. She still likes to cuddle and wakes up every morning saying "Hi JuJu" as Juliette is in the crib next to hers. She is doing great and I just wanted to give an update on her specifically as she is changing so much these days!

Caroline turns 4!

Sunday afternoon we celebrated Caroline's 4th birthday - hard to believe she turned 4 and that Ben will be 4 in a few months! Caroline had her party at a jump house, which was a big hit with Ben and Abbey! Abbey is pretty fearless and seems to love adventure and being all over the place, so she was thrilled with all the big slides and places to jump! Here is Abbey going down the slide...

Hard to tell, but this is Ben and Caroline battling it out (in a fun and loving way of course!)

Abbey thought she better get some protection too!

And here is Caroline getting ready to blow out the 4 princess crown candles on her pink flamingo cake (made by Aunt Theresa)!

Happy Birthday Caroline!

Family picture

While we had the whole family dressed up, we decided to get a family picture. They actually turned out pretty cute! But, christmas cards have already been ordered and are in the process of being addressed, so I thought I would share these on the blog instead!

Saint Nicholas

Saturday was fun filled too. We had swimming class in the morning (which Abbey loves) and then had our friend Adrian over to play. His mommy and I used to work together, so it was good catching up. We didn't get any pictures of that though.

So now on to Sunday. We went over to Aunt Domi's neck of the woods for church because we heard that St. Nicholas might be visiting after mass...and he did! Here are the Chicagoland cousins with St. Nick...

The cousins all dressed up...

You will notice that Caroline, Abbey and Juliette all have matching dresses courtesy of Aunt Theresa! AND, Ben has a matching sweater (hard to tell from these pictures, but the pattern on the dress matches the pattern on the sweater). We tried to get a good picture of all of them, but this was the best one. Abbey didn't feel like sitting still for pictures, so Caroline was trying to keep her on the step, but it looks in the pictures like she has her in a head lock! So those pictures didn't quite turn out very cute and this one was the only one where they all look relatively happy (except you can see how mad Juliette is that we woke her up to take pictures)!

But this one turned out super cute!