Visit to Pella

What an incredibly fun weekend! Just over a week ago we headed to Pella, IA on a Friday after the kids got out of school. We stayed with our old neighbors and good friends for the first night in town. It was Noah's 8th birthday so Erikka was kind enough to grab cupcakes from the bakery for the kids.

Noah seemed a little embarrassed as we sang "Happy Birthday" to him. He doesn't like a lot of attention solely on him, but he was a good sport.

Our friends' son, Emery, and Mason had fun playing with each other. Only a few arguments as to who gets this toy and that toy :)

The next morning we took our time getting ready and headed down to the field house for Central's indoor alumni track meet. Sean decided to run the mile. And in Sean style, he set out to be a little different and ran it barefoot!

Sean sporting an old Manning H.S. jersey from our days of high school.

Kids from three Dutch alumni track athlete families!

Top 6 decathletes to come out of Central College standing with their
coach, Guy Mosher (4th from left).

When the meet was over, we packed up our stuff from the TerLouw's, picked Madison and Noah up at their friends' house and met my mom and nephew, Max at the hotel.

After settling in and relaxing with a beer, we left to eat at El Charro (yummy!) and went right back to hit the pool. The kids were all very good for us and we had a great time. 

The next morning we hit mass at our old church and were able to see so many of our friends. I miss them so much! I could've visited with them all morning.

My mom and the kids in front of the altar.
I love how my nephew Max always poses without me even telling him to.

After mass there were representatives from Blest Art, Inc there selling products made in the Holy Land. We couldn't help ourselves and splurged a little. Everything was SOOO beautiful!

Love my Blessed Virgin Mary!!!

Noah wanted one of St. Michael the Archangel (he just did a project where he chose him as his hero) and Madison chose one of a girl kneeling and praying. They were small ones and Sean couldn't say no to them, I guess :)

Our plan to leave after mass was altered as Sean invited us out to the Schmitz's house. They are a couple with four kids of similar ages as ours and are good friends to us. Gene is the one who got Sean interested in home brewing in the first place and helped me place the initial beer kit order that we got him for his birthday. Sean wanted to share some of his home brew that he brought back so we headed out to their house. It was great to catch up with them and Sean and Gene were able to exchange beers.

We had such a blast on our visit back to Pella. I didn't think I wanted to go back for Tulip Time this year, but we may have to. You can never get enough Jaarsma Bakery and Pella Bologna, right?

Preschool with Summer

Sean and I made the decision to homeschool Summer for the second half of her preschool year and it's been a wonderful decision so far. I get to spend more time with her before her kindergarten year and we have more time to do other fun things that we didn't have time to do before.

When we lived in Pella, my two oldest kids were introduced to the letter people when they started kindergarten. It was such a fun way for them to learn their letters/sounds that we ordered some materials to use with Summer. She LOVES it. And she really loves the videos of the letter people.

Meet Mr. T with his Tall Teeth :)

We also decided to order the Catholic Preschool Curriculum from the Catholic Icing blog. I just got it in the mail and can't wait to start using some of the material from it. All the craft ideas look fantastic! Even my older kids want to do some of them. If you want to check it out and everything it contains, here's the link.

We schedule time to keep meeting up with friends on Wednesday mornings. We meet up with her friend Meredith (and her mom and sister) at the Bloomington library for story time. The girls head into story time and Kari, Meredith's mom, and I can visit while our two younger ones play. We also try to have a play date every week or two so the girls and moms can get together. It's great!

It's been an exciting adventure for Summer and I. We are having fun and I'm pretty sure Mason is enjoying having his big sister around to play with a little longer, too!

Happy New Year!

New year's eve was a fun one once again! One of our friends sets up an ice skating party for an hour and then continued celebrating at their house. We had such a wonderful time last year and the kids were ready to go again this year.

I went ahead to the ice rink with Madison and Noah since the younger two aren't able to ice skate yet and Sean and I aren't good enough to help them along on the ice. We would probably just fall with them :)

Madison always has some form of expression on her face for me.

Like father, like daughter!

I was lucky to get a shot of Noah. He was always ducking his head so I wouldn't get a picture of him. He stayed close to the edge most of the time since he hadn't skated for a year. His friend, Kyle, was kind enough to skate along side of him once in awhile.

And off my two rugrats go!

We had a great time at the party afterwards. It's always fun to catch up with people that you know, but don't run into all the time. We headed home around 10 or so. Just in enough time to bring in the new year with the kids eastern time :)

My goofy family! We're all enjoying cheese & salsa dip while watching the New Year's Eve special. We also broke out "kids wine" for the kids just in time to do a "cheers" at midnight. They love it when we get that stuff :)

My and my trouble makers!

I hope everyone else had fun bringing in the new year. Now let's see how long we can keep our new year's resolutions going. Oh wait, that would mean we would have had to made them. I better get going on that! 

Happy New Year's everyone!!!

Grandpa Clark makes it to Normal, IL!

Everyone was so excited that Grandpa Clark was going to make it to Normal to visit us. He hasn't been able to get here yet since we moved so the kids were anxious to show him our place! He arrived on Wednesday, the 28th of December and stayed until Friday morning.

The kids were attending sports camps at Game Time Gym the next morning yet so Sean thought it'd be a great idea to brew a batch of beer with his dad.

Here they are getting the grain ready to go in the pot of water.

And yes, we had to have a little fun with this. Grandpa Clark added nuts to make a face because they were making some sort of nut brown ale or something. Can't remember for sure.

The beer was taking longer to brew than we thought so Grandpa Clark started checking out some you tube videos. The smallest kiddos each had to make sure they got the chance to sit on his lap to watch with him. I think it was just needing to soak up as much attention as possible!

Grandpa Dick is still smiling :)

That afternoon we decided to hit the Children's Discovery Museum. The kids really wanted to go and had been bugging us about it all week. It'd be a great chance to show Grandpa Clark one of our favorite places to go while he was here, too.

Lots of fun at the museum! Just noticed that I must have been following little ones most of the time because I don't have many pictures of the big kids. 

Grandpa Clark and Noah are in a pretty serious game of chess!

Since the weather had been so amazing that week, we decided to grill out that evening. It felt more like spring than it did winter. Crazy!

Sean cutting the ribs to place on plates.

YUMMY!!!

And before the end of the evening, we of course had to get some of the typical photos of the kids and Sean with his dad.

Sean and his dad each drinking one of Sean's home brews :)

The kids surrounding Grandpa Clark!

It was so great that Grandpa Clark was able to come visit and everyone had a great time. Can't wait until the next visit!

Christmas

I'm quite a bit behind on getting blog posts out, but I WILL catch up! This one will be a combination of things from getting our Christmas tree until Christmas day. Basically, mostly pictures with a few words about each. Here goes!

It's our tradition to go to a tree farm and cut down our Christmas tree on Thanksgiving weekend. This year we decided to wait until a week later so the tree would be fresh longer.

And the tree has been chosen!

Love it, but will probably go back to a fir next year.

Sean giving Noah a lesson on how to cut down the tree :)

And now it's Madison's turn.

Oops! We had bigger eyes than our ceiling is. Time for Sean to go out and cut a little more stem off the tree and we'll try again.

It wouldn't be Christmas without the kids decorating gingerbread houses.

Summer & Mason w/theirs.

Time to make some yummy Christmas cookies!

All decorated and ready to eat. It's fun to see the different ability levels of applying frosting :)

Since we weren't driving all night on Christmas Eve, Sean was able to read "The Night Before Christmas" to the kids.

Love this one of Summer cuddling up to him as he reads!

Our tree! This is the first year we used ribbon instead of tinsel roping. I had a star topper w/white lights, but it only worked one night so I had to return it. This caused me to actually attempt making the bow for the top of the tree, but I should've made it a bit bigger. Wasn't bad for my first try and next year I will make sure it's more proportionate to the size of the tree.

The stockings along the fireplace. Buddy, the Elf, is keeping an eye on Mason's stocking :)

And you can't forget the cookies and milk for Santa!

Last, but not least, is all my kiddos in their Christmas attire. I forgot the camera on Christmas day to take one of the crew in the church, so about a week later, I made them dress up at home just for this picture. They weren't too happy with me, but I got the photos I wanted.

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a wonderful time with family and friends over the holiday season.  As usual, it went way too fast. We wished we could've had a little snow, but it was still great for us all to be together. We had a great time!