Christmas decorating

After Thanksgiving was over, we decided to get into the holiday spirit and get our decorations up. I forgot how much work it all is - thank goodness we still had Madgie and Patch here to help! Ben was so excited to start decorating!

Putting the ornaments up...

Abbey got into it too (although lately all she wants to do is take things off the tree - not cute!)

Here is everyone doing their part!

Abbey getting some help from Patch...

Juliette was in the spirit too as she looks forward to her first Christmas...

And now we get down to the real reason Ben was so excited to decorate...the trains!! We told him we had to decorate the tree first before we could set up the train and I have never seen him so focused on getting something done! He has been playing with them non-stop.

Thanks Madgie and Patch for coming up. We had a great time with you and really appreciated you watching the kids and letting us sneak out for a nice dinner by ourselves (something very rare for us). We love and miss you already!

Field Museum

We decided to spend Friday at the Field Museum. We joined the membership this summer and were glad to have the opportunity to use it again. Madgie and Patch with the kids outside the museum...

Ben and Abbey were super excited to get started and see everything with Madgie...

Even Juliette really liked the exhibits...

Ben was a big fan of the dinosaurs...

Mommy and Ben having fun...

Family picture!

Thanksgiving Day

We have so much to be thankful for! For starters, we are thankful for our two beautiful daughters.

We are so thankful for our handsome son and his grandparents (all of them).

We are thankful for the blessed year we have had with the new addition to our family.

We are thankful for good food and turkey friers.

We are thankful for amazing family that we got to share this day with and for those amazing family that we did not get to see on this day.

We love you all - Happy Thanksgiving!

Children's Museum

Well we had a great thanksgiving weekend (this will take several posts). Madgie and Patch came up to visit and we certainly kept them busy! The first day they were here we went to the Kohl's Children's Museum, which is about 20 minutes from our house. The kids had a blast and we decided to become members. Here are Ben and Daddy playing...

Abbey shows Madgie that she can in fact climb on top of anything.

Ben playing in the transportation area - of course!

Even Juliette was enjoying herself (at least for the brief amount of time she was awake while we were there!)

Legoland

Well we were looking at places to have Ben's 4th birthday party in February and thought about Legoland since it is nice and close to us and Ben loves legos. So, yesterday we went to check it out!

The tour starts by showing all kinds of things they have made out of legos. There were animals, TV characters, movie characters, the city of Chicago and even the President! The museum part was very cool, but Ben was a little too young to fully appreciate it I think. Paul, on the other hand, got a huge kick out of it...

Ben did think Batman was pretty cool...

Here is Ben ready to go on the roller coaster - he was very brave and loved it!

There was also a tour of how they make legos and a 3D Bob the Builder movie that the kids liked. And the best part was the huge play area with slides and all sizes of legos to play with. The kids loved it, but we decided it was a bit too chaotic for a 4 year old birthday party. But it is a great place if you are looking for something different to do - we will probably visit again in the winter months.

Siblings

I am constantly trying to take a great picture of all 3 kids, but this task seems impossible! Here are a few cute ones I took this weekend, but none worthy of framing yet...

Abbey actually put her arm around Juliette without any prompting - she loves her sister!


This one is cute of them looking at each other...

If only Juliette had been smiling in this picture, it could have been frame worthy...

Very cute, but Abbey was done with pictures at this point!

Fun weekend

We had a great weekend. The weather was very nice, so we went to a small zoo in Wheaton with Uncle Phil, Aunt Sandy and Joey! It was nice because it wasn't too big and the kids could easily walk/run around without too much hassle. Aunt Sandy pushed Juliette most of the time and we appreciated her help as Ben and Abbey were all over the place and we were busy running after them!

Uncle Phil pointing out the deer to Joey and Abbey

Ben gets up close to a duck

Cute pic of the Daddy's and toddlers

We had tons of fun - thanks for taking us to the zoo!

Juliette is 3 months!

Juliette is 3 months old now and she has been learning a lot lately! Here is Abbey reading her a very important book. You can tell Juliette is enjoying it by the smile on her face! In other ND news, Ben can now sing the entire fight song. We have a video of it so we will have to post it sometime soon. Needless to say, we are very proud!

Ben and Abbey giving Juliette a kiss. This picture cracks me up because Juliette looks terrified - why are you doing this to me Mommy?

And Juliette has learned to suck her thumb. It puts her to sleep every time. The only problem with it is that she tends to scratch her face with her other fingers. I try to keep her nails short, but clipping an infant's nails is hard!

Juliette is growing, but slowly. Last week she began to get fussy while eating and I didn't feel like she was eating very much, so I took her into the doctor on Saturday for a weight gain check. She had only gained 4 ounces in 3.5 weeks. So, we started supplementing her with formula. I took her back in today for her 3 month check-up and she had gained 9 ounces since Saturday. So, I guess she needed some extra food. I was on the lookout for this as this is the same time that Abbey started to lose weight. For whatever reason, I can only breastfeed for about 3-4 months. But the good news is that she is now 10 lbs, 15 ounces and 22.5 inches long, which puts her in the 25th percentile. I expect she will go back up once she is on all formula, which will probably happen pretty quickly (if it goes the same as it did with Ben and Abbey). She is smiling and talking a lot and really starting to look around and notice things. She sleeps for about 10 hours at night and we have had only one time that Abbey woke up and we had to rock her back to sleep. So, all in all, she is doing great!

Fun Weekend

Whew, what a week. Our family has been pretty sick this past week. Ben stayed home on Monday and Abbey stayed home on Wednesday and Thursday and everyone stayed home on Friday (but that is normal). Then Mommy got sick (bound to happen after spending 4 days home with sick kids). By Friday, we were mostly feeling better and anxious to get out of the house. Luckily, the weather was amazing and we had that opportunity! We bundled up to play outside, but soon found we did not need all that bundling!

On Saturday we went over to our friends' the Glynn's house. Their son Keegan is 2 and their daughter Kasey is one week younger than Juliette. Since the weather was so nice, the kids got to play outside in the sandbox - what a treat for November!

Ben had a great time playing with Keegan and all his cool toys.


Kasey was adorbale, but we tried to keep some distance since we had all been sick this week. I couldn't resist and held her for just a little bit, but we didn't get any pictures unfortunately. Juliette slept through the whole thing, but hopefully next time she will be a little more playful. We had a great time and look forward to having a play date again soon (maybe Keegan can come play with Ben's trains this time). Thanks for having us over!

In other Juliette news, she is now officially sleeping in her crib. I would have done this a long time ago (both Ben and Abbey were out of our room by 8 and 6 weeks respectively), but since Juliette is sharing a room with Abbey, I wanted to ensure she was sleeping through the night first. She started sleeping through the night at 8 weeks, but we kept her in our room until we were fully confident in her sleeping. So we moved her in this weekend and all seemed to go well. Although she wakes up before Abbey, it doesn't seem to wake Abbey up. I am sure there will be lots of times in the years to come when they will wake each other up and we will have to deal with that, but I was pleased that a normal night with slightly different sleep schedules (Juliette goes to bed later and wakes up earlier than Abbey) would not bother either of them! We are getting very close to have a normal routine here - yay!

Sorry for the delay in posting, but I was having some issues uploading the pictures on blogger. Anyway, we had a blast trick or treating. Here are the kids all ready before we ventured out.

And just our little ladybugs.

Aunt Teesa came over to help us, so here is the whole gang on their quest for candy.

Abbey loved trick or treating. She wanted to push all the door bells (she would say "push push" as soon as we walked up to the door) and she loved picking out the candy pieces and putting them in her bucket. We brought her back home and Ben and Daddy went out again, but I had to call Daddy to come back and get her because she so desperately wanted to keep going!

Ben also loved it, but he is an old pro this year. Luckily, he was able to teach Abbey how to say trick or treat and thank you. By the way, he borrowed this costume from his cousin Hunter, but he got the most comments on it. Everyone loved it!

Here is how Juliette spent her first Halloween trick or treating time...