Lighting Up Our Lives ...

Since we weren't able to make it to the East Peoria Festival of Lights before the holidays this year (and since the kids all took L-O-N-G naps after bowling earlier), we decided to take the trip.  Better late than never!

For those of you NOT from Central Illinois who would obviously NOT know about the event ... it's a big deal down in these parts.  A holiday tradition, of sorts, that our family has begrudgingly adopted as one of our own.

It's not like going to see the lighted windows along Michigan Ave in Chicago ... and it's not quite like going to visit Candy Cane Lane in Milwaukee.  But the idea behind it is the same.  Tradition.

Something that we did one year, that the kids remember, and now expect to be part of our holiday plans. 

I love that about our kids.  It's so much fun to build holiday traditions and memories with them ... and it's incredible how flexible they are about those traditions.  Since we've lived in 3 different places in the 7 years Jenna has been alive, we've had to adapt.  Change.  Grow.  Adjust.  Not just in our lives and homes and jobs and schools, but in our traditions too.

It saddens me sometimes to think that our kids aren't going to have a real firm memory of any of these things that we've done, or places that we've been.  We work so hard to build these memories with our children, knowing all too well how limited our own memories are.  How little we can all recall about our own childhood, especially before age 6 or 7.

But still, we keep on taking these trips and incorporating these traditions and building these memories ... because we also know that they all contribute to the overall general feeling we have when we think back to our earliest memories. 

They may or may not remember how we used to always visit the East Peoria Festival of Lights while we were living down in Central Illinois.  But hopefully they'll be able to hang on to the feelings.