Hello again

Well, Merry Christmas, Happy New Years, Happy Valentines Day...what month are we in?

Life has swept us into a whirlwind of family visits and holiday busyness and alas, the blog has once again been neglected. Not forgotten, just put low on our (my) priority list.

But we're back! And we have a large backlog of pictures waiting to be posted, so hopefully I can get to that in a few days. I have been kept very occupied with photography work this past month or two, which as been good for us financially but really hard on our schedules. I have been working almost every night, and the nights I don't work on photography I teach piano lessons. Eric has been working extra shifts on Saturdays, and we feel like the old cliche about ships passing in the night...

Eric's Dad and Connie visited in early December; we had a great weekend with them, including a wonderful dinner out at Houlihans (without kids!), Christmas tree shopping and decorating, photography help from Marc, lots of good conversation...it was so good to see them again, and the kids often point out Papa Marc and Grandma Connie in their picture on the fridge. Their Christmas present to us was a membership to the children's museum here and we are so excited to put our passes to good use! It is a fantastic museum full of hands-on activities, and Jack and Ellie are finally at ages where they will be totally enthralled by it. We were planning to go last week until the girls got sick...hopefully soon!

A day after they left my sister and Jonathan arrived with Mikaila and Soli; they were here for two weeks, in which we packed all kinds of interesting and fun activities, including deep-dish pizza downtown Chicago, cookie baking and decorating, looking at the story windows at Macy's in the freezing cold, riding the kids' train at the mall (even Soli, although he fell off the seat at the very end and bonked his head pretty hard), Christmas Eve together at church, wrapping presents for the kids, late-night talks, movie night, a wonderful Christmas day together, delicious ham dinner, sledding, and general merriment. The kids had such a good time together, once we worked out a few sharing and "being gentle" issues... They had great fun and it was so moving to me to see all the grandkids enjoying each other's company.

After their visit, Ellie and Samantha got sick (double ear infection and bacterial infection) so we've been a bit out of it for the past few weeks. As the rest of society gets back into the swing of things this week...we are trying!

(I had some pictures to upload with this post but blogger is "not responding" to my "request" so I guess we'll have to try later.)

Hope you are having a good Wednesday wherever this finds you, and that your caffeine-withdrawl headache is not as bad as mine.