Sleep Training

I'm beginning to think "Why did we bother?!"  Ha!
Even before our kiddos came along I had already bought the Baby Wise books to begin my babies on an eat, wake, sleep cycle.
I knew so many people that had success with it and knew that we would use this method.
Karis was already on this schedule when she came to us from the orphanage.  So that was easy!
Obviously, Brennan & Reegan did not come trained, so we began the process. It took some time, but they were sleeping through the night around  3 months old.  We went on this cycle quite well until each of them turned 3 years old.
Then the night waking started.  Obviously it started with Karis when she was potty trained.  It seemed to go in cycles where it's for a few nights and then it stops.  She is now able to go to the bathroom by herself at night, but she does still come in our room from time to time for a bad dream or something else random.

It's been worse with Brennan.  The last few months we've had nights where he has come in up to FOUR TIMES during the night.  Argh!!  And unfortunately for me I am a light sleeper and have a hard time going back to sleep some nights.
After the third time last night I began thinking "Why did I spend all that time sleep training when I get woken up 3-4 times a night??"  And why don't they wake up their daddy, just me?!

The other day I finally asked Brennan why he didn't wake up daddy and he looked at me and said "Daddy is mean at night!"  Ha!  And it's true.  Jerry is a BEAR when it comes to being woken up in the middle of the night.  Talk about a crank!!  =P

Now I do have to say that they are alright with going to sleep.  Oh, except when they can't fall asleep right away and get out of their bed about 50 times (slight exaggeration there =P) or I find several boogers by the night light smeared on the wall, like I did a couple of days ago!!!  Double Argh!!

Like Karis, I hope we'll be passed this soon.   Of course by then it means we'll be on to something else or Reegan will take her position in the night waking spot.  Two down, one to go!!

Christmas at the Barnwells

Last year we had a very special Christmas Eve and I kept wondering how I could make it just as special this year.  I got the idea from a friend to have fun foods for Christmas Eve.  So that's what we did.  I made 7 Layer Dip, Pizza Dip, Cheese Ball, a Cheerios snack mix.

However, the kids only wanted to eat the Gingerbread Men they had made. 

I let them eat what they wanted for the evening, but capped the gingerbread men at 2 to keep the risk of a tummy ache to a minimum.  Ha!
They were, of course, on a sugar high for the evening which was quite hilarious at times.
First we started with our Christmas Eve tradition of opening new pjs.

Brennan opening his Spiderman pjs were quite an exciting moment!

 

And a new tradition that I think we might just start is a new game for Christmas Eve.  This year they got 3!  One was Trouble.

Brennan & Reegan are still a little young to sit for that long.  Karis can play the game, but it gets a little long for her too.  She still had fun though. 
When Jerry's parents came to visit in October they bought the kids a VTech VMotion gamer.  So Jerry got 2 new games to go with it for Christmas.

I had planned to watch some Christmas movies, but we didn't quite get to it.  We did watch Charlie Brown's Christmas.  Some other special things was a new Waldo book.

We had an old one from some friends that gave us some of their kid's old books and they have loved it.  So Jerry got a new one.  And for our Bible Story we read the true Christmas story of Jesus' birth!!  We had a fun night and made some fun memories.
I don't know if it was the afternoon nap that Brennan had combined with the sugar, but that poor guy could not get to sleep.  I think it was about 11 pm when he was finally asleep.  That is SO unlike him!  So it put our Christmas gift wrapping off a bit, but of course it got done.

The kids were giddy to get out of bed Christmas morning!!

They had so much fun opening all their presents!!  What fun Christmas is with kids!!

Growing up my mom made orange muffins every Christmas morning.  I had to keep the tradition.

They were SO good!!
Jerry was such a great dad and played for a good while on the floor while I worked on our Christmas dinner.  Our friends, the James' joined us for the afternoon and had a great time with lots of eating.  With some more eating, with a tad more eating.  Ha!
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!!

Christmas Photo Shoot

We had a lot of fun doing a couple of Christmas photo shoots this year.  First we went out on the town with some friends and took some family shots.

I have absolutely fallen in love with a site called Picnik.  That is where I did all of the collages you will see here.  Here are a few other random shots around the city of Prague!

I also wanted to get some shots of us at home.  Here is what we got!  I was VERY pleased!

Merry Christmas from our home to yours!!

Cookie Making, Christmas Party/Cookie Exchange

We've had a busy few days, although lots of fun!
Friday I did a bunch of baking for our  Bridge Community Christmas party.
We had a blast!!  The ladies did a cookie exchange and the guys did a meat exchange, of sorts.  We wanted to bring something a little different for the meat, so I made sausage balls.  Yum!!  I also needed to bring a dessert to share so I made Russian Tea Cakes......or Swedish Tea Cakes........or Mexican Wedding Cakes.... or whatever you call them!!  Ha!

For the cookie exchange I decided to try something new and made a homemade version of the Girl Scouts Thin Mints.

I think they came out fairly well.  Crunchy, but the flavor was good and the melted chocolate on top helped the crunch a bit.   There were 12 of us that participated, so we got a nice little assortment of cookies.....American, Czech and Russian!!  All of them are delish!!

Our great hosts, the Browns, played Santa and got every child that came a gift.  How incredibly thoughtful is that?!  Karis got a Barbie-type Belle doll, Reegan got a "My Little Pony" and Brennan got a Hot Wheels something or other.  You push a button and it shoots the car out fast.  They are all loving their new toys!

They also did door prizes.  We didn't win any of them, but they had some great ones!!

We grazed on food all afternoon and evening long, bringing out appetizers, then meat, then desserts in different stages.

We played the "I Never" game.  With a big group of about 20 it was fun!  You can sure learn a lot about people and their past.  Ha!

In other news, it is bitterly cold outside!!  Oh.  My.  Word.  COLD!!  This girl does not like cold!  Yes, I grew up in Alaska and I still don't like cold!  Love Alaska, not the cold!  We're staying in as much as possible, but we've had all these great Christmas things to attend.  And after being in for almost 2 weeks we have been ready to get out!!

Jerry celebrates his birthday tomorrow.  We'll have a babysitter for a few hours in the morning.  Looks like we will brave the cold for a few hours on our own.  Woohoo!

angel girl gone bad

My normally angelic daughter, Reegan,

has turned naughty!! It all started in the last week. Jerry has been away for 5 days so I chalked it up to him being gone (he came home late last night). Maybe that is still the case, but today within a 20 minute period of me running out to get some fruit she went on a rampage!! She normally doesn't leave her room during quiet time!! She didn't even know I was going out for a few minutes (hmmm....could that have anything to do with it?)

Jerry was in his home office working and never heard a thing! She snuck out of her room, dumped out some freshener for the cat liter into our shoes and the cat's food, dumped out the last 1/3 of a 16 ounce bottle of vanilla (THAT I BROUGHT FROM AMERICA) got into some powdered sugar, dumped out some baby shampoo and baby bath soap, dumped out 2 bottles of plax mouth wash and opened my computer and decided to do some typing (even sent a blank empty email to someone).
Sure, she's done some little things here and there, but NOTHING to this magnitude!!
I was (still am!) stunned, shocked and was even very sad. It's like I didn't even know who this little person was!! Not to mention where my mind went to think if she had drank any of those things!!!

I hope this is only a very short lived phase, because THIS was a doozy! Oh my!

One Week!

That's how long the sickness has lasted in our home!  It started out with a flu for Brennan & Reegan.  Luckily Karis skipped that.  On the tail end of their sickness, Karis catches a cold which has now been passed on to Brennan & Reegan.  Poor things!!  To have a flu and then a cold/cough back to back is no fun!  We've been doing lots of TV watching.....catching up on Christmas programs and movies!
Jerry is on a 4 days (with 2 days left) trip to Kiev to visit some team members there.  This sickness stuff always seems to hit right around the time he travels.  So not fair!!  This is luckily a short trip compared to usual!
We had all kinds of things planned to keep us busy and we haven't been able to do one of them yet!

We've been meeting some friends weekly at the park to play.  It's been so much fun to catch up while our kids play.  The weather is getting cold (forecast says snow every day this week) so it might be awhile before we play at the park again.  We were suppose to get together tomorrow for some cookie making/hot chocolate drinking/pizza eating, but I'm not sure we will be able to go.  That makes me very, very sad!

Anyway, here are a few pictures from a recent trip to the park.  This first one is blurry, but Brennan's expression is priceless!!

This is our friend, Sarah Beth (a.k.a. Silver Bells  Ha!).  Reegan heard the song "Silver Bells" recently and thought they were singing "Sarah Beth."  How cute is that?! 

 

My kids love Sarah Beth and we love her family, also our team mates.  They dragged her all over the playground!  And she was such a good sport to pedal them around on this thing.

The other interesting thing we saw on a recent trip to the park.....

Do you see it??  This grandma (she was pushing a baby around) has pink hair!  Do you think she matched her coat perfectly on purpose??

Christmas Tea Party

This Fall the ladies (all of us with our organization in Prague that could participate) have been involved in a Bible Study each week. Once a month we take a break and have a ladies fellowship night. We each signed up for a month and it is up to us to come up with something to do. I purposely chose December so I could do a tea party!!
This is the third time for me to do one.
It's funny to think back to the first one. I also set it around Christmas in 2005. I made these beautiful invitations with a ribbon tied at the top of the paper. It also had each of the invitees names at the top. Since I did not have enough tea cups (had plenty of coffee mugs, but that's not very traditional, ha!), I decided we could do a tea cup exchange. I had also decided to do all the food on my own.
Well, when I set out on this quest I did not have children. In between me sending out the invites (about 2 months early) and the actual party we got Karis and found out we were pregnant with twins!! I was able to pull it off somehow, but I didn't do the party on my own again!
The second one was set around Easter and everyone still wanted to do the tea cup exchange. It was a big hit the first time! Both these times we had done the simple exchange game. You know, where you can steal the gift up to 2 times. That was fine, but for this third party I did not want to do that! So, I found the right/left game. It's a story that is read about the Wright family. Every time I read the word "w/right" the gift would be passed that way and so on. It didn't seem wise to do this with tea cups so I got creative! I found these cute little individual boxes of tea and tied a bow around each one.

Aren't they cute?!

Each person took a box and a number. They put the number on their gift and on their tiny tea box. That way, when the game was done, they would know which numbered gift they would get. It got to going fast and was a lot of fun to watch. One participant didn't have a chance to get a gift for the exchange, so I let her use one of my tea cups for our dinner. She was then able to sit in to do the game for me while I read it.
This time I had everyone sign up to bring something. I gave example ideas for a tea. Our menu included tea, of course (ha!),

cucumber, chicken and egg salad sandwiches, quiche, scones and desserts. Obviously we ate way too much, but it was all good!
I was running around like a busy bee that I didn't get any pictures until the end when we did a multiple choice game about tea and then played the purse game.

And the winners got some lovely smelling soaps!!
Even though I was doing my planning around sick kids I was able to pull it off again! I was completely exhausted that night and the next day. Ugh, and even today! Ha! It was so much fun! Not sure when I'll do that again though!

I Just Knew...

I KNEW it was only a matter of time before we would be hit with this season's sickies!
It was the strangest thing last night. We were getting ready for bed and Brennan let out the biggest sneeze I've ever seen (from him anyway). You know, those kind that leave you dazed and hurts your throat?! Ha!
As he went to bed he kept complaining and I could tell it was genuine. My kids LOVE medicine, so they really have to prove to me they are sick before I just start handing it out!
Then it all began! I just happened to take a Simply Sleep and went to bed early. I did not get enough sleep the night before and wanted a little help to STAY asleep. At 2 am Brennan came in our room. I have no idea why, I was very much asleep. The next thing I know, Jerry is running to the bathroom with Brennan. Poor guy "got sick" (I say that because I absolutely hate the word vomit or throw up! Crazy, I know) about 3 times before his tummy calmed down. He & Jerry laid on the couch for awhile then told Jerry he was so tired he wanted to go back to his bed. About 2 hours later Reegan cried out that she didn't feel well and she was feverish. I got her some medicine, she cried out again that her tummy hurt. I sat with her and it wasn't long before she got sick too.
What a night!! Luckily she only "got sick" once and fell back to sleep fairly quickly. It was crazy because she woke up that morning like nothing happened!
They acted ok the rest of the day, just a little feverish and sluggish but no more getting sick.
They had another night of low grade fever and seem to be sluggish a second day, but I think we are past the worst. I'm glad it was over quick! Still wishin', hopin' and prayin' that Karis doesn't get it!
All the while I am preparing for my tea party tonight! I can't wait to share more about it!! There are about 11-13 people coming and have plans for good food, tea, and games with some prizes! It should be fun!! We are also doing a tea cup exchange. I don't have enough teacups for that many. This is my 3rd time to do a tea party with the exchange. In the past we have always done the ever popular exchange game, but I decided to do something different this time. We'll see how it goes! I can't wait!!

Missing Christmas in America

After spending 2 Christmas' in America, I am missing it somewhat this year.
I know that Christmas is highly commercialized in America, but what I miss are all the events, the church Christmas specials, the Christmas parties and, not to mention, time with the family!
We made some fun memories with the kids last Christmas eve. We started a tradition of giving the kids new pjs for Christmas. We open them up on Christmas eve and wear them that night. After we did that we piled in the van (in our new pjs of course!), covered them up with some new blankets they got and went and looked at Christmas lights. The kids STILL talk about it!

Now don't get me wrong, Christmas in Prague is beautiful!! There is no shortage of Christmas trees. They place one on EVERY known square in the city. We even have one on our dinky little square that we live on. And downtown is gorgeous with mass amounts of lights and Christmas markets displayed on the major squares!! It is definitely something to see and enjoy!!
And we are celebrating in some fun ways this month. I am hosting a tea at my house for all our colleagues (ladies) and I am so excited about it! We are going to do a fun tea cup exchange game, then drink out of the tea cup we got and eat lots of yummy goodies!
Then we've got a Christmas Movie Party to attend on Saturday and then a Christmas Cookie Exchange with our Bridge Community family on the following Saturday. So, we've got some fun things planned!

Then I find myself thinking about where we will be one year from now. Our kids will be older and there is the possibility of us being in a new location by then (more to come on that later). This has been one crazy year with trying to get Karis' American passport to return to Prague, coming back to Prague after 16 months in Texas, readjusting to life here, major changes in the IMB structure that is and will continue to take months to be in place, lots of colleagues moving and relocating because of said restructure AND anticipating a move!!
What's interesting is that this 2010 is probably going to be just as crazy as 2009!!

Luckily, I'm not the type to stress about it. We'll just take one day, one month, one year at a time to see how and what God is going to do in our lives. He's taken us on this incredible journey to do and be for Him!!

We set out on a journey yesterday (and today) to take some fun Christmas photos!! I'll give you a sneak peak. I can't wait to share the rest of them with you!!

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

I love this time of year!! There is just something magical about Christmas decorations and lights. And of course the reason why we celebrate....our Saviors birth.
I got the decorations unpacked the weekend before Thanksgiving! That's the earliest for me so far. However, it took me a week to get it all up with Thanksgiving prep, and Bridge's first baptism.....not to mention 3 other little daily distractions. Ha!
And it took us awhile to locate our tree! We were in the US for 2 Christmas' and we had let colleagues borrow our tree and decorations. All the decor was back in our apartment, but we had to do a little hunting for our tree. We found it of course. And here it is:

Bridge Community's first baptism!

I've mentioned our new community outreach/church start that we are a part of with other colleagues from our organization in Prague. We kicked off in September and it's been so great to be a part of!
This past Saturday we had our FIRST baptism!!! It's such an incredible story! Sonja came to Christ through the example of her son. Lubos, her son, became a Christian while fighting (as a profession) in the US. When he returned to Prague he shared his faith with his mom. She was sure he was part of some sect and was ready to do all that she could to get him out! Little did she know that it would turn her to a saving faith in Jesus!! Praise God!! It was so wonderful!!
Sonja invited some friends who are not believers and we pray they saw Christ in each one of us! And of course there was food afterward!! Ha!