1 Family x 12 (April)

The late winter/early spring months are usually the hardest ones for me to get these monthly family photos in.  Typically we have less going on in these months and we're hunkered down and doing less until the warmer weather start coming back around.  This year its even worse.  We're over a month into social distancing meaning that any plans we might have had are being canceled weekend by weekend and the days are moving by slowly.  I know we're no different than anyone else right now, but if I'm being honest, it's really starting to bum me out!  We miss our people and all of our activities and fun things we have planned.  But, I think (hope) there are brighter days ahead.  With only one week let in Ryan's travel job, and warmer/sunnier weather in the forecast, I'm hoping things start to look up here soon.  

1 Family x 12 (March)

Guys - the world is a crazy place these days.  We all know that, so I'm not going to harp on it here too much, but I use this blog as a family journal and photo album so real life gets documented here.  For the last 6 years, my March family photo has been taken at the Dells.  We've been taking the kids there in March to get the wiggles out and enjoy some time with friends.  This year, Corona Virus changed all of that!  As you can imagine, the kids were so disappointed to lose yet activity (one that they look forward to all year).  So, Ryan planned a little water park adventure for us right at home.

The original plan was to have Jamie/Zach and Chris/ Brenna families over to our pool party as well (we were just one person over the 10 person rule), but it's safe to say that we are all a little freaked out right now so everyone opted to stay home to try and keep their little families safe.  It wasn't the same, we missed the real thing, but we did our best to make lemonade and we're trying to remember how lucky we really are.  I have a feeling this whole ordeal will give us all a lot of perspective.  Maybe life looks a little different on the other side of this.  But, for now, we're taking it one day at a time....and hoping everyone is staying healthy and safe. 

We miss our friends very very much!

Girls Day - Painting Pottery

Presidents day weekend the girls and I had plans to travel to Charlotte NC to visit Ryan while he was working down there.  But, if one things is constant, it's that Ryan's schedule is ALWAYS changing and the timing just didn't work out so we ended up staying home.  Knowing we traded a fun trip for a normal weekend at home, I thought it would be fun to surprise the kids with and early daycare pick up, with Auntie (!) and a trip to the pottery painting studio in Algonquin.

We've never done pottery painting before but it was SO fun!  We each picked one piece to paint.  Hazel picked a guitar jewlery box, Abby picked a cute unicorn mug (for hot chocolate!), Erin got an adorable fox mug and I picked a yarn bowl (used to hold a ball of yarn while you knit so it doesn't get tangled or roll around on the floor).

Abby used the cute mug in the background as her inspiration and she did such a good job.  She was slow, and careful and really thoughtful about her colors and placement.

Hazel, sweet Hazel, was a little more, what's the word, non-traditional?  HA!  Not correcting her was probably the hardest part of the whole evening for me.  I just wanted to take over and do it for her, but that's not what this was about.  So, check out her artistic expression!

Erin's of course, turned out the cutest of all.  She's so talented and I'm so glad I have her around in my life to help me make all sorts of art things like my seasonal chalkboard art, the girls first day of school posters and so many other random projects.  I've even enlisted her to help paint something cool in the kids toy room!  You know, once we drywall in there.

The girls thought this little outing was so much fun and we enjoyed it too!  Next time we'll BYOB and some more snacks.  It took a few weeks for us to get back the finished products, but I picked them up last night, and look how great they all turned out!

Poinsettia Quilt

This past winter I decided it was time for me to make us a Christmas quilt!  Of course, the inspiration of this wonky triangle quilt had something to do with it.  Even though I knew it wouldn't be ready for us to use this past Christmas, it was really fun working in holiday colors over the holidays.  For some reason, I end up getting the majority of my quilting projects done in the winter months.  And this year was no exception!  I already have two (almost three!) finishes under my belt for 2020.  But, I shouldn't brag too much, things will come to a screeching halt here soon I'm sure!

This quilt was designed by Suzy Quilts and the fabric was a curated pack that she put together as well.  I'm not great at coming up with the ideas myself - I don't have the vision, but I can follow directions and I love a good modern quilt!

This quilt measures 56x65 and should be the perfect size for displaying on the couch and cuddling up with over the cold winter months.  I had it quilted in a pattern called Feliz Navidad and we used gold thread.

Isn't it just awesome?!  I'm also pretty happy with how well my quilting came out on this one.  The points of my triangles lined up really well and overall the quilt turned out great.  These wonky blocks though!  They were NOT easy.  The fun thing about them is that they are all different sizes and angles.  You'd think that that "randomness" would make it easier, but I wasted a LOT of fabric making this quilt.  So much so that I had to order extra to finish it!  The wonky triangles were hard to estimate and if you didn't line things up just right, you'd end up not having enough fabric to make your full block.

As pretty as the blocks are, the backing is the real show stopper in my opinion!  The sun was a little too bright this past weekend (what a problem, I know!).  but you can see the gold backing in the next two photos.  I"m not sure how well it'll hold up over time, but gosh, it's pretty!  And so luxurious too!

Anyways, this quilt is now hanging on my quilt rack just waiting til next Christmas.  Though, I'm sure it'll be used for many a fort before then!

Murphy Family Volunteer Day

Guys - we did a thing, and we had SO MUCH fun doing it!!  I'll go back to where it all started.  Back in August a group of the cuzzies rented a house in northern Wisconsin and spent a week enjoying our time together.  One late night over cards (and beers, of course!) we started talking and realized that we could do better.  We realized how fortunate we are, looking around at all we have, and our strong family that supports us and we realized, it was time for us to start giving back.  That was the start of this family volunteer day.

We did some research, looking for a family friendly volunteer opportunity that would welcome kids and we found Cradles to Crayons a charity located in downtown Chicago that provides kids with toys, clothes, hygiene supplies, books and other essentials.  Schools, hospitals, churches, welfare agencies etc all submit requests to Cradles for Crayons to support needy kids and those orders are filled in the warehouse downtown.

Cradles to Crayons takes donations of used items, and new, and money, and then turns those donations into kits given to local kids and families in needs.  In the warehouse, volunteers sort, clean, pack and then bundle the items to send out to the kids. 

On this Saturday in February, about 25 of the Murphy family got together to volunteer and help work at the warehouse.  Guys, we had SUCH a good time!  About 2/3rds of us were in the packing station, which was a really fun place to be.  We got to take the lists for each child and then "shop" the shelves to fill their orders.  It was fun to be so close to the end recipient.  We got to see the fulfillment of all of the hard work that came before this station.

The other 1/3rd of our group moved between two stations during the time we spent there.  They started out in the cleaning station, scrubbing lightly used shoes and getting them ready for repacking.  About half way through the day the switched to sorting clothes.  Going through the bags of donations, sorting for size etc and packaging those pieces up into bags that we (in the packing station) would pick up and bundle for the recipients. 

We spent about 2 hours helping out at Cradles for Crayons and it was one of my favorite activities we had scheduled this winter.  It fact, it sounds like we're already planning the next family give back day - a walk to support pancreatic cancer this summer.  I hope that this is a tradition we start to do a few times a year.  We always have a great time when we're together, and doing something that helps others on top of that is just the icing on the cake.

Oh, and!  Pizza and beer to follow definitely helped keep us motivated.  After we finished our shift at Cradles to Crayons we migrated the group over to Revolution Brewery where we had pizza delivered (it was SO GOOD).  We had lunch, hung out and overall, had a great day!! 

I totally think this is something we'll organize again, so, if anyone has any suggestions of places we could volunteer with a large group, and kids, we're all ears!!

Ice Castles at Lake Geneva

About this time last year Mom came across an article about ice castles at Lake Geneva and we immediately thought the girls would love it.  If you have girls in the same age range as ours you know anything remotely Frozen is likely a hit!  But, by the time we heard about it and looked into tickets it was totally sold out so I put it on my watch list for this year and waited patiently for them to release info. 

Sometime before Christmas Jamie got an email that they were selling pre-sale tickets for a discount but you had no idea what dates and times would be available.  Knowing what we found out last year, we both bought tickets during the pre-sale and figured we'd sort out the details later.  We got tickets for my parents and hers as well and we'd planned to try and all go together in one big group.

Turns out, I didn't have my calendar as updated as I thought and I double booked us which meant the Ritterbusch/McGrath part of the group had to split off and go a day sooner.  Not ideal, but we made it work.  Anyways, rewind back to Christmas when it was randomly 50 something degrees outside and we slightly considered doing Christmas dinner al fresco on the back deck.  You're probably not surprised to find out that most of the hard work of creating the ice castles was ruined and they had to delay the opening much later than originally planned.  I was worried we'd never get tickets, but luckily it all worked out, the weather cooled down a little (though, not a lot!  It's been a very warm winter).

So, the ice castles finally opened last weekend and we ended up going on opening night.  It was honestly so much fun!!  We started off the evening with dinner in an igloo (Mom's find!) at Mars Supper club, then we spent a few hours at the ice castles exploring and we ended the night in downtown Lake Geneva where they were putting the final touches on the snow sculptures for Winterfest which was scheduled for the following day. 

The ice castles were busy, though not nearly as busy as it was the following night according to Jamie.  While there were a lot of people around, there was plenty of room for us to explore and plenty of things to see and do.  They even had a few slides made up which the kids loved.  The big slide had a LONG wait...everyone except Dad and I wanted to go, so we held down the fort near the fires, drinking hot chocolates, chatting and watching the fire dancers.  Not a bad gig if I do say so myself!

The girls loved it, we all had a great time and while I'm not sure that we'd need to go back every year, I can say for certain that we'll likely do this one again.  It was fun to do something different, celebrate winter (which we're usually all so sick of by Feb) and spend time together as a family.

If you live local, I'd definaly give this a thumbs up and tell you to look into getting tickets.  It's pretty, it's different and it's fun!  But, wear snow pants and insulated boots!  Both Ryan and I made regrettable shoe choices and we'll never do that again!

Plan your tickets to be there at night, and if you're really feeling wintery, try out the igloos at Mars.  It really was a good time!

PS: Aren't my parents the cutest??  That's them in the picture above.  And, Dad and I below.  These, silhouette pictures were my favorite thing of the whole night.  Our family photo may be the cover of our 2020 blog book!

1 Family x 12 (Feb)

This past weekend we did something REALLY cool...and really fun.  I'll post more on it later, in a full write up of what we did, but for now, I'm sharing our family photo for Feb.  It's a fun one!