Violet is 10 months old! Happy Thanksgiving!

 You are getting bigger everyday, Violet! I am so anxious to see your picture next month! According to Babycenter.com you are beginning to understand simple words and phrases and you are starting to say some yourself! You may be able to play games and wave bye-bye! You can grab toys and may be able to stand up and cruise the furniture. Your big sister started walking at 9 months, so you could definitely be walking all by yourself. I cannot wait to find out next month!

Happy Thanksgiving! Clay and Aidan are home all week on Thanksgiving break. We are going to visit Clay's grandpa, and then go to his family for a day, and then visit my family on another day, so we don't have much "break"! We hope to get a lot of adoption work done! Passports and online classes, reorganizing to make room for a toddler and all the things that come with them! We shall see how much actually gets done! We are a bit different than the average adoptive family in that this is not our first child. We have all of our bedrooms already filled up with children ;). Many adoptive parents bide their time by decorating and painting a nursery, picking out cribs and rockers and dressers...this is not us. We have a crib, covered in bite marks from a teething Faith, that we don't even plan to put up. We have a little girl room already filled to the brim with toys and a closet packed with size 4 clothes. Violet in fact, does not have one item of clothing or toy yet in this house. Its kinda funny how lackadaisical we have been about preparing with material things. All you need is love? Right? LOL I remember preparing for the birth of Faith. She was my first girl, and everything had to be perfect! We spent hundreds of dollars on a crib, I spent months picking out the right crib bedding. MONTHS! And then the paint color had to match the colors just perfectly, as well as the curtains, etc...then we brought the little darling home. She never... EVER...slept in her beautifully painted room. She also never used the $500 crib - except as a giant teether, and the pack-n-play was used as a giant toy box for all the toys she didn't care to play with.  We co-slept with Faith and loved it and we assume Violet will be happiest co-sleeping as well since that is what she does now with her foster mother. When the time comes if she would prefer a crib, THEN we will set it up. But sticking my baby in a bed with bars alone in a dark room is just not my style. Concerning closet space...we have none. I honestly have NO CLUE where we are going to put her clothes! So hopefully that is something we can figure out this week - or Christmas break?! But I am not too worried about it. Writing this reminded me that I did not have my own closet as a child. I was a "surprise" and my parents turned my mom's tiny sewing room into a nursery for me and I shared part of a closet with my brother (most of my clothes were hand-me-downs from him too!) & I also had a dresser :).  Somewhere in the attic should be a tote with Faith's baby clothes, that will now be Violet's (hopefully they are the right size in the right season! Faith was born in June & Violet in January!).  I do, however, plan to buy her clothes and I cannot wait!! That is the funnest part! Hopefully I will find out her size next month when we get the update on her.