U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing

Today the kids and I along with one of Little Miss's friends and her mom went to the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

I have been wanting to take a "field trip" to the BEP for some time but I wanted to take both of the kids. So since Little Miss is in school full-time I had to wait until there was a non-federal holiday to be able to go.

What a great outing!

On the way there I made a "worksheet" for the kids (I'm such a teacher!) that had four large circles and a large rectangle on it. We then gave each kid a quarter, dime, nickel, penny, and a dollar bill. Each child was supposed to draw each coin onto the circle and the dollar bill into the rectangle.

Here's what we ended up with :) I think if they'd had more time (they did these in the car on the way to the BEP) that they might have turned out pretty good!

You are not allowed to take any electronic equipment into the building so we left all of our stuff in the car, went through security, and then boarded the bus that takes you into the main building. We were the Red Tour group. Since our tour didn't start right away we went around the downstairs and learned about security features of the new notes, how to recover money that has been damaged, and how notes were made originally. We also saw the many different versions of notes through the years.

Then we set off on the tour. We got to see millions of dollars being printed, sorted, cut, stacked, and inspected. I believe that they said that they make around $267 million dollars every day and this year they will be making $151 billion for the Federal Reserve. After the tour we went and watched the educational video. It was really interesting. We learned that the engraved plates that are used to imprint the bills are hand engraved. An engraver must complete a 10 year engraver apprenticeship in order to actually engrave the plates and they do it all by hand ~ it was amazing to see.

Finally we toured the upstairs. The two most interesting displays for me were the note magnifier and the damaged note section. The note magnifier let us zoom in super close (that's the scientific term) to each bill and see the amazing security features added to each note including miniscule writing on different parts of each note. The damaged note section told how there are people at the Federal Reserve that are pretty much "forensic money" detectives. They can take severely damaged money and figure out the denominations of the bills. There was a story of a man that had been saving money his whole life by putting it behind his furnace in the basement. When he died his wife took the money only to find that it had "melted" together into solid bricks of money. She sent it to the Reserve and they examined the money and were able to determine that the value of the money that she had sent in was somewhere near $325,000 and they sent her a check for that amount.

Obviously I had a great time today. It was a little over the kids heads but they had fun just the same!

Here are the only pictures that we were able to take at the Bureau today :)

New Year's Eve 2009... Ringing in the New Year!

We spent New Year's Eve 2009 at my parents house playing games and watching the ball drop. Little Man actually stayed up (not by our choice) to watch the ball drop for the first time.



We got out the party hats and noisemakers and even set off some party poppers.

Happy New Year!

My Year in Status Updates (Facebook) 2009

There is a Facebook application that picks status updates from the last year and puts them into a collage. Pretty Cool! Here is the one created for my year in status updates.

Gingerbread Houses 2009

GINGERBREAD HOUSES 2009

We decided to try out Gingerbread House decorating this year. I bought two kits from Joann's because I heard that they were the best. Ryan made the houses the night before Christmas but today was the first day that I thought we might actually have time to decorate them :) The icing was a lot trickier than I expected. It was a learning process for us all but we made do and ended up with some pretty fabulous gingerbread houses!

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2009

It snowed on Christmas Eve in Texas! Apparently is hasn't snowed here on Christmas Eve since somewhere around 1923. It was beautiful!

Ryan and I had fun hanging out on the deck in the blowing snow. We also took Little Dog for a walk as a family and froze our butts off ~ it was COLD!!

Christmas Day was wonderful. We had too many presents as usual :) but at least it was less than last year. Year after year we are getting bigger "toys" but less of them which I like.

After opening presents we hung around the house and did some cleaning up because our family came over for Christmas Dinner around 6 pm. Ryan and I cooked salmon, barley risotto with asparagus, and fresh green beans with pine nuts. It was delicious and a very light dinner which was nice so that our stomachs weren't so stuffed when we opened up all of the presents from our family. My parents, Ryan's parents, my sister, and Ryan's brother and sister in law were here this year and we had a blast!

As I look back on the evening I realized that I only took 5 pictures all day and the ones I took I took in the morning. We were so involved with talking, catching up, and having a great time that we didn't really think about taking pictures :)

Christmas Cookie Decorating 2009

Our biggest family tradition: Christmas Cookie Decorating

Every year the entire family gets together and decorates Christmas sugar cookies. This year was no different. My parents, in-laws, sister (and her boyfriend, Ryan), me, Ryan, and the kids, and my brother in law, Denver, all got together today to continue the tradition.
I made sugar cookie dough and peanut butter kiss cookie dough, my mom made two recipes of sugar cookie dough, my mother in law brought sugar cookie dough, and my sister brought sugar cookie dough. My mom made Corn Chowder and my dad made his famous Chili and we chowed down on lunch before we set to decorating hoping that maybe lunch would fill us up and we wouldn't eat so much cookie dough .
We cranked up the Christmas music (Amy Grant and Clay Aiken) and got into the cookie making spirit by singing loudly and eating a lot of icing :)
Little Miss and Little Man truly had a wonderful time this year although halfway through Little Man was looking a little "over sugared" because he had eaten so much cookie dough and sampled a little too much homemade icing! Little Miss really got into it this year and did a fabulous job decorating her cookies.
All in all we made and decorated 108 sugar cookies!

Here are some pictures I took with my iPhone.
We forgot to bring our camera so as soon as I get copies of some of the best, I'll post them :)

Little Miss's Kindergarten Christmas Party

Little Miss had her class Christmas Party today. Oh what an event it was. There were balloon centerpieces and Christmas table clothes, crafts galore, food, and a book exchange. And she got to wear her pajamas to school today! I think that was her favourite part :)

This morning they had Fireside Reading with her teacher and then the Christmas party was this afternoon at 2 pm. I showed up with Little Man (in his pajamas as well) and helped to set up and get everything ready for the kiddos.

The kids came in and set to making their crafts. They coloured wooden ornaments, decorated foam bell shapes, and made jingle bell necklaces. Then they feasted on cheese cubes, pretzel sticks, cupcakes, grapes, strawberries, and hot chocolate. During all of the hoopla, each kid got to go and pick out one of the wrapped books in the library (each child had brought a wrapped book to give).

Little Miss and Little Man had a blast and I got a couple of cupcakes to each as well (anyone who knows me well knows that that is the most important thing :) ).