December Fun!

December is always a busy month.  So many festive things on the calendar!  We've been keeping busy with holiday festivities such as Breakfast with Santa, putting up a special "Star Wars" tree in the family room (Erik's Star Wars ornament collection finally grew large enough to require it's own set of branches!), musical Christmas programs at school, baking lots of Christmas cookies, taking family photos for the Christmas card, having snowball fights, finishing holiday decorating around the house, visiting the "Winter Wonderland" exhibit at the Botanic Gardens, enjoying holiday parties with friends, making gingerbread houses and finally, celebrating Christmas Eve at a beautiful church service. It's a non-stop party around here!  Thank goodness we have Santa to handle prepping the Christmas presents!

Family Photo, 2018

Tyler's Jr. Kindergarten Christmas Program

Decorating the Star Wars tree

Complete with a Death Star tree topper (!)

The manger that holds such meaning - I grew up with a similar one in my house, and my mom made a replica for each of my sisters and I to have.

Nighttime snowballs!

Reading Christmas stories

Breakfast with Santa

Making homemade playdoh

Making Christmas cookies

Decorating gingerbread houses

Gavin's 3rd grade class - Christmas program

Cassie's 5th grade class - Christmas program

Irish Dance Christmas Show - Cassie's the 4th one over, in the purple hat!

Dinner with great friends

Botanic Garden's Winter Wonderland

Christmas Eve Mass at SFX

Christmas Eve - opening 1 gift from each other!

Milk & Cookies! (And carrots and letters!)

Holiday Preparations

We are ready to usher in the holidays!  The kids were in charge of setting up our Dicken's Village scene this year.  They were excited to handle it themselves and were actually very careful and worked together pretty well!  The kids love to show it to any friends or neighbors that pop into the house.  We also put up the Christmas tree and the kids each hung ornaments from their boxes.  It's always fun to unwrap each ornament and reminisce.  And the evenings feel so cozy with a warm fireplace and twinkling tree.
As we prepare for Thanksgiving, we joined an effort that is lead by a local friend of mine to assist families in need.  We helped to gather up Thanksgiving meal supplies and spent a Saturday morning at a local church on the south side of Chicago packing up bags as folks streamed through.  Not only did a huge amount of food get into the hands of those that need it most - but this day also provided an opportunity for us to have a dialogue with the kids about what really matters, and to stress the importance of giving unto others.  I know we all left that day feeling gratitude for the blessings in our lives and saying extra prayers for those that need some extra help this season.
This takes us up to Thanksgiving - a holiday we always look so forward to!  We spent Thanksgiving with the Brown crew out in Clarendon Hills.  It'a always nice to get everyone together and to enjoy a wonderful meal together! The next day, we made it over to the Brookfield Zoo with all the cousins.  Feeding the birds was a highlight, and Tyler always loves to see the penguins (his fave).  We also walked down to the park near Grammy and Grandpa's house for playtime, and the kids also opened up their annual Christmas ornament from Grammy.  This is a special tradition from Grammy, and the kids really enjoy opening those each year.
On Saturday, we drove down to Lafayette to have our second Thanksgiving celebration with part of the Reder crew!  Tracy and Steve prepped a delicious meal (as always!) and we loved seeing Kelsey and Ethan too, both home from college.  We missed the Burkholders and my parents, but look forward to seeing them for Christmas!

Changing Seasons...

The weather continues to turn and fall is starting to feel like winter!  We are enjoying the family room fireplace in the evening, making chili for dinner, and playing outside in the first snowfall of the season.

Back to College!

At the end of October, we headed south for the weekend - back to campus!  It was Homecoming Weekend at the University of Illinois, and Erik and I, along with my 3 best college girlfriends and their families, took the crew back down to campus for our own little reunion weekend.  We had an absolute blast.  We rented a home just a few minutes off campus that easily held our crew of 8 adults and 12 kids.  The kids refer to it as the "glass house" because that's literally how it was listed on the rental website - a unique house full of floor-to-ceiling windows on literally every wall (which were all curved, too).  It was a really odd, but fascinating house, and it worked for the weekend!  We spent our time touring old campus haunts, lounging on the quad, of course taking in the Homecoming football game, and paying a leisurely visit to the DG house.  How fun it was to show our kids where the 4 of us moms used to hang out together - our old bedrooms, the sunroom, the big kitchen hall.  They were able to walk the halls and find all of our pictures hanging in various places.  The house does a great job of always making it feel like home and making us forever feel welcome there as alumni.  It was also fun to be able to show the kids where Erik and I met, and show them what our lives were like back then!  I'm betting that out of that big group of 12 kiddos, we might have a few future Illini!