First Thanksgiving!

Cruising for Cheerios

The girls are both cruising now, helped along by the awesome coffee table at Chickigram and GPa's. Their pushtoys at home are now actually functional. We can't believe how FAST this is happening!

Sorry for the lack of frequent posts... we had a wonderful trip to Illinois, but the family kept us really busy! This post will be pretty long, but hopefully the plentiful pictures will make up for the dearth of posts over the past 10 days...

Friends

We got to visit with several of Mom's friends and their kiddos...

Tirzah and I were roommates in Champaign before she moved to California. She's back in Illinois now, living in Chicago, where her husband, Rob, is working on his PhD. She graciously packed up her boys and stopped by with Robbie and Leydon. The boys very nicely shared their cars and trains with the girls. Robbie also showed us his writing skills, which were very impressive! Tirzah is a photographer, and she took a bunch of pictures of the girls, but I totally forgot to take out my camera while they were here! Argh!

Sara is one of my friends from high school... she used to live across the street from my parents' house, and now lives in Naperville with her husband Mike, and Jack and Emma. They stopped by on Thanksgiving morning. Izzy tried to steal Emma's signature headband, which caused some consternation in the taking of this picture :)

Kathy and I met at the Tomahawk Aquatic Center, where I had my favorite job ever (sorry MCB!) as a lifeguard the year after I graduated from high school. Kathy is now an assistant principal in Oswego. She and Jim are in the process of adopting some little ones from Ethiopia! She stopped by with Mark and Tessa, who is the president of the online Abby and Izzy fan club :)

Family

As expected, we had a LOT of delicious food for Thanksgiving dinner. As a family, we have so much to be thankful for this year, and it was fun to go around the table and "itemize" from time to time throughout the meal. One of the things that we are all very grateful for is that it's fun to spend time with our family, and not a burden or a chore. We had so many laughs throughout the holiday!

The girls loved their time with Aunts Chelle and Casey.

Obert Family

Abby and Daddy

Abby and Chickigram

Friday night, we had the extended family over for desserts and fun. My cousin came with his twins, who were born in June, which was pretty fun!

Great-Grandpa got lots of laughs from Abby and Izzy throughout the night.


Jodi and Abby

Fun

Much of our vacation was really relaxing, spending time with friends and family in the comfort of Chickigram and GPa's living room, but we braved the FREEZING COLD outdoors on occasion to have a bit of fun outside!

There is a deer farm in Braidwood right by the tree farm that we always used to go to for our Christmas tree, so we bundled the girls up to see them. Abby and Izzy both really seem to love animals, which is fun for us. These pictures don't depict the deer extraordinarily well, but there were a herd of fallow deer behind the fence.

After watching the deer for a while, we stopped off at the Polka Dot, which is a 50's style hamburger join, for lunch. Aunt Casey introduced the girls to The King and promised a future trip to Graceland, Abby had fun with Aunt Chelle's hat, and Izzy hot-rodded a bit in the little red car.

We grew up playing and swimming at the Braidwood Recreational Center, so we thought we'd take a little drive through and play on the playground. They still have most of the equipment (cleaned and repainted, of course) that I remember playing on as a kid, which was pretty fun for me.

The cool climbing caterpillar.

The Aunts. (You can see a "full body shot" of the caterpillar in the background.)


The girls continue to LOVE swings

Izzy really loved the slide, but Abby kept getting stuck halfway down. They were more or less nonplussed by the merry-go-round, although everyone giggled when Mom fell down at the start of the ride.

Abby got a kick out of the new dinosaur toy.

My Christmas music rule has always been to wait until the day after Thanksgiving to start listening to Christmas carols... and then to listen to them and sing them NON STOP until Christmas! We used the same rule for our pictures with Santa this year. GPa had heard that Santa would be at the Bass Pro Shop starting the day after Thanksgiving, so we got the girls bedecked in their Christmas outfits and got ready for a long line.

Happily, there was NO LINE when we got there. Izzy was pretty excited about Santa's beard, and both of the girls were happy to sit in his lap. We're pretty sure that Abby told him that she wanted a dog, since that's her favorite word at the moment, but we're trying to keep her hopes down on that one :)

All of the "elves" at the Bass Pro Shop were SO friendly... if you're in the area, I highly recommend the Bolingbrook location for all of your Santa and outdoor activity needs!

The Santa experience was clearly exhausting for Izzy, who modified her headband into a sleeping mask and conked out on the way home :)

True to form, the girls found a bookshelf to empty at Chickigram and GPa's when we got home. They are very excited to learn to read!

...but not as excited as they are about eating shoes...

The girls were very good on the airplane, although we're going to start investigating infant fares, because full flights are harder. I'm working on getting them back into their normal schedule.. Abby had a rough night last night, and they both slept until almost 9 this morning, so the morning nap started a little late. Hopefully we'll be back on track by bedtime...

We miss everyone already and are really hoping that both side of the family will move here SOON!