Back in Grayslake

OK, so I'm falling behind in my blogging a bit, as what I'm about to post happened 3 weeks ago, but I promise I'll try to catch up. The weekend after Silas's birthday, we went back to Grayslake to visit our friends and the boys' friends too. James and Amy Tanner were very gracious hosts, letting us crash at their place and even letting Joel and Silas use Elizabeth's room. We even ended up staying a day longer than planned as Iowa got hit with a huge snow/ice storm and I-80 and I-380 were basically shut down on Sunday.

Here's Elizabeth, Joel, and Silas having fun building with KAPLA blocks. Check out Joel's outfit - Pajamas, tennis shoes, and a burger king crown. You gotta love it. Don't you wish you could still dress this way and get away with it?

Silas is hangin' with the ladies here, Elizabeth and Ella.

Jorie went to visit our friend Alissa, who had just given birth to identical twin girls. Silas loved the babies and he couldn't resist trying out the bouncer and sticking both fingers up his nose. Lovely pose, Silas!

We couldn't resist driving by the old homestead a few times while in town, but safe to say, we are very happy to be in our new Iowa home.





On the way home from our trip, Monday night, we were amazed to see how many cars were in the ditches and in the median along the highways in Iowa. We started trying to count, but quickly lost track when we started passing 10+ car pileups. It was seriously insane. We'd pass a slick spot and then a little hill and then we'd see a spot on the side of the road where tons of cars had gone off and just slammed into one another over and over. I'm very glad we made the decision to stay in Grayslake Sunday night.

As it turned out, we didn't make it all the way home Monday either. The roads were getting a little icy and Silas woke up near the I-80 truckstop and did NOT want to go back in his car seat. So our choices were either strap him in and try to drive through the icy conditions at midnight with a screaming 2-year-old, or we could stay in a hotel. Being of the masculine persuasion, of course I wanted to press on at first, but eventually I consented and decided it was worth it to leave in the morning. And HOLY COW the roads were still really bad on I-380 (between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids) so it's a good thing we waited. The ice was so thick and bumpy on the highway, we had to slow down to 20 mph for long stretches. That would have been tougher to do safely at night and with no other traffic on the roads. But in the morning, it was no problem. And there were STILL cars going off the road, even that Tuesday morning we saw people getting stuck in the median. But we made it, safe and sound! Hopefully spring will come soon, as I have had it with snow and ice and shoveling and cold and BLEH!

A very veggie birthday!

Silas is now 2! And we had a very nice family birthday party for him. It was great that Grandpa John and Uncle Tim got to come out and visit for a couple days and be here for Silas's birthday, too.

As you'll see from the pictures, the theme was VeggieTales and Jorie went all out, with a VeggieTales cake, VeggieTales invitations, VeggieTales party favors, VeggieTales gifts, Veggie-colored plates and balloons, and even a Veggie Tray. Ha! The boys even got Larry and Bob shirts, which we bought off E-bay. Silas has been asking for a "Bob" birthday party for months now, and I think all his wildest dreams have came true with the actual event.






While Grandpa John and Uncle Tim were here, they helped Joel and Silas build a snowman in the front yard. Unfortunately, the snow wasn't packing too well, so it ended up being a midget alien snowman. Still very cute!

Pictures from the latest blizzard

Here are some pics from the most recent snowstorm, since I talked about it in my last post, but didn't include any actual pictures. Turns out we got 17 inches of snow in about 24 hours.



I included these last two to show off the height of my snow shoveling accumulation piles. That's gotta be some kinda record.

Enough with the snow already!

I think we picked the wrong winter to move to Iowa. This has been one crazy season of snow. I'm sure we're breaking records for snowfall. We got another FOOT last night. Yeah, I said FOOT. See pictures below.

These pictures are actually from January - we have even more snow now.
The kids like to ride their trikes in the driveway despite the cold and snow. I guess they are looking forward to spring.


So, I hope everybody enjoyed that Superbowl. I loved seeing the mighty Patriots go down. I've never liked Belicheck and I can't stand how the media constantly labels him a genius, when all he is is a grumpy sourpuss cheater. Congrats to the Giants and to the NFC for finally producing a Superbowl champ! (5 years since the Tampa Bay Bucs won - wow) Hopefully the Bears can get back on track next year. They still have a lot of talent on their team - too much to miss the playoffs again. They just need a little O-line help and oh, yeah, some consistent QB play. Is that too much to ask?

We actually almost missed the Superbowl, due to an adventure we had on the way to our friend's Superbowl party. We got a lot of snow the afternoon before the Superbowl and we were considering just staying home instead of going to the party, but I thought it would be fun to go, so we loaded up in the car and set off through the unplowed snow. And the roads didn't really seem all that bad, as long as you stayed in the grooves the other cars had made. But I guess the roads got a little worse as we got farther away from the city and I didn't really notice. Suddenly I found my right side tires were in about two inches of snow, and as I tried to steer back to the left to get back in the grooves, the car wasn't moving left. So I steered a little more, still plowing snow, getting a little worried now. So I steered a little more and suddenly it found a little traction and jerked to the left. A little too far to the left because next thing I knew, we went into a spin. All I could think of as the car spun around at about 45 mph was those two little boys in the back seat. I thought about what could happen after we left the road - would we hit something? would we flip? All I could do was pray the boys would be OK. Fortunately, God was protecting us, because we went off in a very safe spot - a shallow ditch with a big drift of nice soft snow. We came to a pretty soft stop, actually. Silas immediately started crying, as he knew something had gone wrong, but Joel just asked, "Why did we stop? Why did you drive off the road, Daddy?"

Another huge blessing was that Delane, the host of our Superbowl party, has a big truck and towing chains so he was able to come pull us out of the ditch, and we didn't have to pay a tow truck to do it. The car was mostly OK, but since we went off the road facing backwards, the snow piled up underneath the front bumper and popped it right off the car. So there is some repair work to be done for that, and I think we're going to need snow tires on at least one of our vehicles. These all-season tires are a joke if you're in serious snow. Maybe before next winter.

The kids hanging out at the Superbowl party. Joel proudly wore his Urlacher jersey. Silas proudly picked his nose.

So, besides all the snow and sliding into a ditch, what else have we been up to? Jorie and I had a nice little getaway weekend at a Premier Designs rally in January. The boys did very well staying at Grandma's house for a couple nights. We also recently became members at the Children's Museum, which is at Coralville mall. (about 20 minutes south) This allows us to bring the boys as often as we want, for free! The great thing is, the membership is good for Children's museums across the entire country AND we can bring two guests for free too, so we can visist Children's museums whenever we travel for free, and bring our friends. Naperville and Chicago both have Children's museums that we hope to visit soon! Come with us and get in for free! Free is always good.

Joel says his favorite room at the museum is the construction room, which is really designed for older kids, but he loves working with the tools and bolting pieces of wood onto the house frame. Both Silas and Joel of course love the room with the giant train table and all the Thomas trains. Actually, we haven't even been to every room of the museum yet, since we have the membership, we don't feel the need to rush through everything and squeeze it all into one day, so we let the boys decide how long to stay in each area.

We've gotten a little more plugged into a church here, called "New Covenant". We went to an ABF class this past Sunday for couple with small children and it was excellent, so we are excited to feel like we might have found our church home. They have very good children's programs at this church too, which was important to us. Plus, we feel like we've made some friends, from the New Year's party we attended. Jorie has hung out with some of the girls and their kids a few times (the first trip to the Children's museum was a mom's day out) and we are planning to start up a Bible study group with a few couples too, so that will be a great time to get to know some people here better.

Joel's new bunkbed has a double bed on the bottom, so of course all the boys had to try it out.



Play-doh time! One of our favorite activities.

Christmas festivities

Joel's Pre-school did a very cute Christmas program. It was amazing how many songs these 3 year old kids were able to learn. And Joel did a great job with the songs and the motions. He was one of the few kids actually singing and doing the right motions to nearly every song. I skipped out of work for an hour (vacation time) to go see the program and it was well worth it. Just another benefit of working from home, as that would never have worked without my arrangement.

We had a family reunion scheduled with Jorie's Mom's family in Lake Geneva, WI, the weekend before Christmas. With the kids continuing to be sick, we weren't sure if we were going to make it. Silas was really the one who was sick the week before the trip, but he seemed to be getting better and it looked like the timing was going to be perfect for the reunion. Then, just as Silas got better, Joel came down with the same stomach flu bug that Silas had just gotten over. So we decided that we weren't going to make it to the reunion. This was extremely frustrating to me, as it seemed that our lives had been put on hold for nearly two months, since the the kids had been sick pretty much non-stop since the beginning of November. And now we weren't going to be able to attend a huge family event. Total bummer.

So then on Saturday, Joel seemed to be feeling a little better, and Annie called us and said that everyone really wanted us to try to come to the reunion, even if Joel was still a little under the weather. So, at the spur of the moment, we decided to go for it. We threw together our stuff in about an hour, got everyone bundled into the van and took off around 4:30pm on Saturday. Just one problem - a snowstorm had started at about 3:00 pm and now we were in the thick of it. And it was BAD driving conditions, about as bad as it can get - lots of snow and some freezing rain too. But we made it to Dubuque, IA, and after that it was just rain throughout Wisconsin.

So we made it to the reunion, 1 day late, and had a good time catching up with family and joining in on games and the variety show and the kids had a blast playing with their extended-family cousins. Joel especially liked playing with the older boys, Jack and Grayson, and Silas loved playing with the littler ones, Annikah and Trevor.

Joel was hilarious at the variety show. We wanted him to go up and recite a few poems he had learned, but he was shy at first. But once he heard his voice in the microphone, he turned into a little performance artist! He didn't want to give up the mic. He loved entertaining the crowd, and he even added an extra poem that we hadn't planned on him reciting, just because he wanted to keep going.

So the reunion was fun and we were very glad we made it. Unfortunately, it was freezing outside and there was hardly any snow in Lake Geneva, so we couldn't really do any outdoor activities. On Monday, we headed back to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Christmas morning, Joel and Silas were very excited to open lots of presents. They received plenty of Thomas the Train toys, some new movies, pajamas, and books too.
Later during the day on Christmas, we put together a Gingerbread house, which Joel really enjoyed. He was very proud of his decorating job.

The Dillmii's

On the Nintendo Wii, you can make these cool little cartoon characters by choosing different facial features, face shapes, colors, etc. It's a heck of a lot of fun. Here's our little family pic, Wii-style.

Aaaand, here's the cast of Seinfeld. Yeah, I have too much fun with these things.

More Sledding

I am shamelessly stealing this from Roxanne's blog. This is a video of several of us sledding in Grandpa's backyard.

Yes, I broke the sled. Luckily, the store took it back and replaced it with a new one - yay Hyvee! I love Jason's comment after his crash: "It didn't work."

Roxanne has been a huge help with helping me figure out how to post videos on the blog, but the hangup right now is that our camera records in a format that is not supported by Windows Movie Maker (quicktime - bleh), so I have to figure out if I can record in something else so I can edit the videos before posting them. Wish me luck, I know videos are the best.