Christmas Ornaments - 2010

Matt & I find a new ornament for each kid every year. We try to find something that represents an accomplishment from the past year...or something to shows their character.

Maddie was first with this "Hugs and Cookies" ornament. We wanted to find something with milk - not a day goes by without her spilling her milk!! When we found the cookies too, we knew that one was it! She always wants to help in the kitchen and she loves her cookies. Esp. HyVee (grocery store)...aka...Cookie store. The bakery gives cookies to the kids - every visit to the store ends with a yummy cookie!

Will was next with this old fashioned fire engine. We took this picture of him to shrink and place on the bottom of the ornament. He LOVES his fire hat and coat...many times adding his winter boots to the outfit to become a real "fire engine guy".

Alex's ornament is a girl mouse all dressed up in fancy clothes (totally Alex's personality!), climbing a ladder. The ladder represents the new bunk bed for the girls - Alex sleeps in the top bunk so she uses the ladder a couple times a day!

The last ornament was Katie's - it is a cute little girl dressed up in a fairy costume. Katie has a big love for fairies! She reads anything and everything she can! She has written stories, plays, articles, etc about fairies as well. Of course her favorite is Tinkerbell!

Thismas

The Barman family celebrated Thanksgiving & Christmas on Thursday! Katie had a wonderful idea of calling our holiday "Thismas" and even wrote a song to accompany the new name!

For Christmas, all of Becki's siblings will be traveling to spend the weekend with their in-laws...so we chose to have everyone together on Thanksgiving - and it was wonderful!!

Here is the whole "fam-damily" as Clark Griswald would call us...

We started our day by eating lots of yummy food - thank you to the diligent work of Debbie!! Here is our table(s) of 22! This is what Thanksgiving is about!!

Here are some close up shots - one of Kayla, Katie & Abbey, the other of Becki's brother Dave & sister-in-law Peggy.

Every Christmas, Becki's Mom puts together a Christmas pageant - all focusing on the birth of Christ. We have had many years of Mary & Joseph and baby Jesus (all played by various neices & nephews...and for a few years, a real baby Jesus!), sheep with shepherds, cows and angels. This year, Alex & Katie were angels while Will played a shepherd and Maddie played Mary.

After the program, the kids were SUPER excited to start opening their presents from Grammy & Grandad. As always, the kids LOVED their presents and couldn't believe that Grammy & Grandad knew EXACTLY what they wanted!!

The annual tradition of the Coke / Pepsi gift exchange...Brad received a lovely wood/block perpetual Coke calendar from Matt...Matt received a stylish Pepsi hat, straight from the Pepsi museum! Brad also gave this t-shirt to Becki's dad (he is also a Pepsi drinker). Matt kidnapped it and put tape over "don't" and used a Coke logo to cover the Pepsi logo! We all got a kick out of it!

It was a wonderful day together - we packed a lot of things into just a few hours!! It would have been nice to stay longer...but bedtime called! How blessed we are!!

The Tree is Up!

The start of the Christmas season - generally Thanksgiving weekend - means putting the tree up, decorating the tree and house, baking & Christmas cards.

Here are some pictures of us decorating the tree. We enjoyed our time together and it goes so quickly with 4 extra sets of hands!!

We always start our tree decorating by recording the kids getting their new ornaments (chosen by Matt & I). We give them their new ornaments and explain why we are giving them that particular one. Here are the kids anxiously waiting!Katie

Alex
Will
Maddie

Iowa City - Conquered - Finally!!!

We can finally check Iowa City off of our Letterboxing grid! After 10 trips in 3 years, we are ready to set our heights on other cities for a while! If you have followed our blog at all, you have seen that Iowa City has been a thorn in our side! We seemed to always run into obstacles along the way. Our last trip, a few weeks ago, left us with 2 remaining boxes. We were bummed that we ran out of time to grab those 2, but knew that we would be back...that time came sooner than we thought when Prairie Rose planted a series in Lake MacBride State Park.

Driving to Iowa City (about 60 minutes from our home), we saw lots of Black & Gold...the school colors for the Iowa Hawkeyes. It was game day and most cars were headed to the game! We dreaded being in town the same day as a game, but that proved to be a benefit! Because of this, the bike trails were extremely quiet. Always a nice bonus with 4 rambunctious kids and trying to discretely stamp in!

Our first stop was "Iowa Cemeteries: Agudas Achim: Pebbles". This was a replant done by Prairie Rose. We found the church but no cemetery...so, I used my "phone a friend" and called my sister who looked up an address for us. We were thankful she was home. The cemetery was a small one...and a ways out of town - we never would have found it without her help! We decided to bypass it since it was farther north. When we finally made it there after lunch, the kids enjoyed learning about all the pebbles on the gravestones in this Jewish cemetery.

Our next attempt was another Prairie Rose box, "Iowa Cemeteries: St. John's: Spring Crocus". We had previously attempted this box August 1. The growth of weeds around the tree were so bad that we couldn't find the box. Matt noticed that it had been found recently, so we tried it again. We were fortunate this time!

Coming back into Iowa City, we ate lunch and headed to Maude's "Road Kill Series: Skunked!". Very cute story & stamp. We loved the history lesson while walking along the Mormon Handcart Trail. Got some good pictures of the kids and we got to listen to the Iowa marching band as they were gearing up for the game!

Next came a WOM box by Prairie Rose, "I Dream of Letterboxing". While stamping in at this box, we were excited to see 4 fighter jets flying overhead. Super cool!

Our last boxes of the day were "Midnight at MacBride", also by Prairie Rose. This series of 3 is meant to be boxed at night. We knew we would be ending our day here and thought it would be dark...however, when we arrived, it was only a bit past 3. We knew that the kids would be spooked by night noises, so we decided to try the hike (while still light). To say that it was a challenge in the daylight would be an understatement! But it was worth it! Great stamps and a great hike (albeit cold!) in a beautiful park. It took us the better part of 1 1/2 hours, but we finally got the last box and headed back to the car - just in time for the sun to go down! We ended our time in Iowa City with 7 boxes - most likely ending 2010 with 966 boxes! We are excited about finding 1000 in 2011!! Here we are celebrating the last box in Iowa City (and all of Johnson County)!

Chicago with the Kids - Day 3

We ended our weekend thinking that we would finish out the Cemetery Stroll series.  As I told you earlier, we had found 2 of the 7 boxes on Friday.  Looking at the clues, we saw that 3 of the remaining boxes were in the same cemetery.  We figured that we could knock out the 3 boxes pretty fast, grab the other last two boxes and hit the road for a fun visit to the children's museum...well, that was the plan anyway!!

3 hours later!!!  We finally had our 3 boxes, 6 hungry people and 4 (okay...6) frustrated family members.  We were able to find Cemetery Stroll boxes #5, 6 & 7: Mob Massacre, Anarchy, Stealing Bases to Saving Souls. 

The Girls with one of the amazing statues!

Here are the kids having a blast at the Dupage County Children's Museum.  We really wanted to go to the Children's Museum in Glenview, but time was not on our side!  They did enjoy this one - esp. the bubbles and water station!!

We played at the museum for a little over 2 hours.  It was a good way to end our very long weekend.  It was safe to say that all of us were tired.  We picked up dinner and drove home.  Overall, we found 21 boxes, spent a day at a wonderful zoo, went swimming and played at the children's museum.  Not too bad for a 3 day weekend.

Chicago with the Kids - Day 2

I'm sure that there is a fact out there that vacations with kids generally go downhill starting the 2nd day...even if not, there SHOULD be!! We woke up early, ate breakfast and headed out to get as much letterboxing in as we could! We were welcomed with rain. Not a good thing for a day of letterboxing! We had a list of boxes - mainly driveby ones - to find in north Chicagoland. We ended up with 8 boxes for the day...but attempted another 8-10. It was a frustrating day to say the least. The kids were very tired of sitting in the car. With it raining off & on, it was hard to let them out to run off energy. Here is one park that we stopped at to play (while Matt looked for Weeee Girl.) 

Alex climbing the dinosaur

We stopped for lunch (hoping and praying to rejuvenate the family!!). Luckily, it did revive us and we continued up north to find Just Lion Around by Tat2Bob & Kimberly. What a beautiful park, Chain-o-Lakes!! I had Matt & the kids stand on this bridge while I took their picture from the road.

We knew our daylight was coming to an end, so we quickly drove to Glenview to "The Grove". We spent some time in the visitor's center and then hit the trails. We came across a family of deer while on the long boardwalk. It was amazing to watch! We found the box (again, we were off on the clues!!) after hiking the trail 2 times!! The sun was setting by the time that we got to the van...but then Matt remembered seeing clues for another box located there. We read them quickly, looked at a map and decided to try a short cut (since it was dark now!). Matt ran ahead, found it and stamped in.

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Farmer Katie



We were excited to try to find two of the train station stamps by Beetle...and hoping to see a train!! Will loves trains and airplanes...so we decided to forego swimming that evening so we could go to the train stations and to eat a late dinner at the O'Hare Oasis. You can imagine how bummed we were when, not only the stamps were missing...but no trains either!! We got to the Oasis around 8 and ate dinner while watching all the airplanes landing and cars driving under us! That was a highlight for all of us!

Maddie shows how we all felt at the end of the day!