Grandpa Ken Visits - Nov/Dec 2017

Grandpa Ken flew in for a week long visit earlier this month.  We had a wonderful time with him!  The kids were in school all week, so he got a taste of what our typical week looks like. 

He got to watch Will participate in the First Lego League competition.  This was held at John Deere Headquarters - so we got to explore some pretty amazing tractors! The second picture is of the family while we watched the competition, high in the rafters!

After the FLL competition, we loaded into the van and headed to Peoria for the remainder of the weekend.  We were looking forward to showing Grandpa a few of our Christmas traditions...

Saturday night, we drove straight to the Festival of Lights in East Peoria.  Here's our annual "waiting in the car" picture! 

We were lucky and didn't have to wait too long to get in to see the lights.  We headed to dinner than found our hotel for the night. The kids swam for a bit then everyone headed to bed.  It had been a long day.

 

The next day, we woke to sunny skies and headed out to show Grandpa some of fun things in Peoria.  We were surprised to see this new statue along the riverfront.  Doing some research, we found out it's called "Return Visit" and that Peoria just got the statue from Chicago in September.

Our last stop for the day was The Community Festival of Nativities. My sister told me about this last year and we decided to give it a try. We were so glad that we took the time to see it.  Here's Kaitee, admiring a set from Guatemala.

Of course, our time with Grandpa would not be complete without a trip (or 2...) to Whitey's to indulge in delicious ice cream!!  Will decided that he wanted to savor his ice cream, so he asked for a sample size spoon every time.  I'd say that his face shows the pure delight that Whitey's brings!

We've often wondered why Whitey's includes a straw...They just don't work!!

Our time with Grandpa was wonderful!  Here's a few pictures of us just being funny. 

At one point, Matt tried to put this box over his body (the same box that went over Will's body...completely covering him!).  It was pretty comical as Ken walked over to Matt for a nice Father/Son picture.