MichaelandChrissy.com

Happy New Year to all of our friends and family!  Let us know your New Year’s resolutions so that we can make fun of you for skipping out on them in a month!  I’ve resolved to lose that last ten pounds and to resume learning Japanese, so wish me luck.  Chrissy has resolved not to resolve anymore.

I stopped going out on New Year’s Eve years ago, once I figured out that I didn’t like the bar scene.  Chrissy is the same way, so we’ve spent several of the last ten or so years sleeping through the countdown (only to be woken up by small arms fire just after midnight).  Sure signs of getting old…

We decided to stay up for the New Year tonight though.  Felice is going to hang out with us.  I finally got my Sony Blu-Ray player set up and working with the surround sound so that we can watch movies while we wait.  We’ve got “The Happening“, which I’ve wanted to see for a while, and “Eagle Eye” in HD.

We’ve got a few bottles of wine, including a bottle of Inniskillin Ice Wine (2006) to uncork at midnight, and a chocolate cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory.  Chrissy also made several dozen of her chocolate-chip cookies (so much for losing that ten pounds).  It should be a fun night!

Chrissy turned thirty on Thursday, December 4th.  It’s a big milestone in a person’s life, to be sure, but we couldn’t celebrate then because she had a Master’s class that night.  So, we decided to mark the occasion with a trip to Chicago on the following weekend.  I had gotten her a new Canon Powershot A2000 camera for her birthday, and we wanted to put it to good use during our visit.

On Saturday afternoon, Chrissy and I drove out to Chicago for our reservations at the “Chicago Chop House“, a highly rated steak house.  Our waiter, Glen, was very knowledgeable about the food and wine.  We settled on a bottle of German Riesling, which was very tasty.  The food was fantastic: I had a “Cowboy Cut” Prime Rib, seared and seasoned with Cajun spices, and Chrissy had the hand-prepared “Surf and Turf”.

We thoroughly enjoyed the food, and we are one of those weird couples that feed each other during the meal.  I always end up wishing that I had what she ordered.  We finished up with dessert: Chrissy had a hot fudge sundae and I had a huge slice of “Chocolate Triple Play” cake.  It was a great meal, but easily the most expensive one that Chrissy and I have ever had.

After dinner, I had planned on going to the Hancock Building to have a few drinks at their lounge on the 96th floor.  We also had the option to attend a symphony on the University of Chicago campus that night.  However, Chrissy was full and happy, and anxious to get home to our kids.  So we cut our Chicago outing satisfyingly short.  Even without after-dinner plans, we had a great time and enjoyed each others company.

Chrissy likes to have professional pictures taken of the boys every three months or so.  We’ve been to a lot of places for photos, but I think that we have settled on the studio in our local Wal-Mart.   The photographers there always manage to make Aiden smile and they’re very accommodating with our requests.  Also, they are willing to sell us all the images on a CD with copyright permissions.

Chrissy had a number of poses in mind for this year (and a change of clothes for both of the boys), so we hit each one in turn.  Our photographer was very helpful, and took care of everything that Chrissy wanted.  We went with a split theme of Christmas and “Indiana University” (we seem to collect IU-branded clothes) this time.  The pictures turned out fantastic, and many of them will go out with this year’s Christmas cards.

Chrissy and I attended the UChicagoTech Christmas Party on Friday night (this is our fourth year running!).  This is a special event for my office every year, as it’s not just for the UChicagoTech employees, but also for many of the law firms, licensing companies and University faculty that we work closely with.  Our department has just over twenty people, but 170 people attended the Christmas Party.

The venue, actually a florist called “A New Leaf“, was very nice with interesting architecture.  It smelled really nice in the lobby.  We took advantage of the free valet parking, since it’s hard to find spots in  the Lincoln Park area.  The food was an excellent buffet of finger food, and everything was thankfully clearly labeled (I hate it when I have no idea what I’m eating).  Dessert was a selection of delicious chocolate truffles.

One tradition for our office party is the psychic.  Chrissy and I get our fortunes told at this event every year, just for fun.  Sometimes the psychic is pretty good (like the one that told Chrissy that she was pregnant with Aiden, even before she knew), and sometimes they’re not so good.  This year, the psychic was pretty good.  Apparently, we both have bright futures ahead of us!

We spent a little time mingling with my coworkers and their significant others.  We even got a shock as my boss’s boss’s boss sat next to us at our small table during dinner.  They were very nice people, it was just a little socially jarring.  I made sure not to drop my fork!  Overall, it was a very nice outing, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.

We took the boys to the George Carden Circus at the Hammond Civic Center on the weekend after Thanksgiving.  It was a pretty good show for such a small venue (it was literally the size of a high school basketball gymnasium).  Aiden had never been to a circus before, and he was captivated.  I forgot how much circuses smell like, um, animals.  There were lots of animals there.

Aiden and I got to ride an elephant before the show started.  There was a number of good circus acts.  We saw a lion tamer, and he had a white tiger in his pride.  The clown was pretty good.  The highlight for me was the motorcycles speeding in the steel sphere.  I’ve never seen that up close before.  Then again, I’m used to circuses of the Soleil variety.

The boys were very well behaved: Aiden switched often between my lap, Chrissy’s lap, and the bleachers; Gavin cried a bit, but we couldn’t hear him over the various acts, he mostly just took the bottle and looked around.  We had a pretty good time, but it leads me to wonder how much better the (much more expensive) Ringling Brothers Circus would be.

Last night, Chrissy decided that Gavin should try something a little more solid than formula.  So, she mixed up some baby cereal for him to try.  It wasn’t much more than a thin gruel.  He didn’t take to it very well, and pushed most of it out of his mouth with his tongue.  Maybe he’ll be more receptive next time?

I remember when Chrissy first gave Aiden solid food.  He didn’t seem to like it at all then, and he didn’t like it this time, either.  Chrissy gave him a bite of the baby cereal, since he was asking for some.  His expression was funny, at first, until he started dry heaving.  No wonder Gavin didn’t want any!

Gavin slept through the night for the first time last night.  It was a shock because Aiden began to sleep through the night at fifteen weeks old, so Chrissy and I were crossing our fingers that Gavin would do the same.  At fourteen weeks, Gavin was still waking up at 2 AM and 5 AM every night, so we weren’t holding out much hope for a big change in a single week.  But we got lucky!

Or so we thought…  When daylight savings time kicked in on Saturday night, all of our clocks automatically fell back one hour.  So Gavin woke up at four?  Well, no.  Our bedroom clock went completely wonky and reset itself four hours ahead.  Chrissy woke me up for work at 2 AM, thinking that it was in fact 6 AM.  We were so happy to see that both kids were still asleep!

Chrissy didn’t realize the error until we turned on the TV for the weather forecast, and it said that it was 3 AM!  I was just about to drive to work, assuming that it was still dark outside because of the time change, but instead went back to bed.  When we crawled out of bed for the real 6 AM, Gavin was just waking up (and hungry!).  We’ll have to see if this was just a fluke!

Halloween is a pretty big deal in our house, and this year marks Aiden’s first real “Trick or Treat” experience.  I was really looking forward to it.  When I first heard that Barack Obama was holding a political rally at nearby Wicker Park on the same night, I wondered why he would overlap with a holiday.  The rally even started right in the middle of Treating hours!  To paraphrase from the great works of Dr. Seuss:

Clearly Obama hates Halloween!  The whole Halloween season!  Now, please don’t ask why.  No one quite knows the reason.  It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.  It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.  But I think that the most likely reason of all, may have been that his heart was two sizes too small.

I understand that there is less than a week before the election, but at least give more than two days notice for such a huge rally.  My first reaction was to take the whole family to see it, but not during my favorite holiday.  Wicker Park seemed more than happy to pre-empt their own Halloween concert schedule, however, and many others ditched Halloween to go see Obama.  Our usual huge crowds of costumed revelers were severely stunted.

Some people stuck around for Halloween though.  We had about a dozen small groups stop by.  Just before Trick or Treating started (only from 5-7 PM in our town), we took the boys around the block to Grandma’s house for photos.  On the way back, Aiden got to try out Trick or Treating for the first time (in his adorable lion costume).  Then we hung back on the neighbor’s new front deck to pass out candy.  Due to the sparse turnout, we packed up early.  We still had fun though, and I’m looking forward to a better night next year!

Aiden was too young to carve pumpkins last year, but we thought it would be fun for him this time around.  We bought our pumpkins about a month ago, and they’ve been sitting on our front porch for a while.  This weekend was the last chance to carve them before Halloween, so we got to work on them.  We haven’t carved pumpkins for a few years, so this was a re-education process.

We picked up a carving kit last year (we love day-after-Halloween clearance items!) that included some awesome templates.  I picked out a ghost template that didn’t look too complicated and Chrissy picked out a “spooked” face.  The tools that the kit came with made carving easy.  We put down newspaper and gleefully cut them open.

The evisceration quickly got messy.  We stripped Aiden down to his diaper so that he could help clean out the pumpkin guts without ruining his clothes.  He didn’t like it.  Chrissy’s tiny carving saw bent halfway through, so she gave up early to take up baby duty.  I finished my ghost and then turned hers into a “puke face” pumpkin.  They turned out pretty nice!

Scheeringa Farms is a fresh produce vendor not far from where we live.  It’s a nice, family-owned place close to Cline Avenue and 45th in Highland, IN.  They have a petting zoo every year around Halloween, but we’ve never taken Aiden there before.  Chrissy’s Mom took Aiden last year, but Chrissy and I have never gone ourselves.  Well, today we took Aiden and Gavin.

Aiden enjoyed feeding the animals, but they were really hungry and sort of aggressive.  There was a vendor that sold animal food there, so we bought an ice cream cone full of seeds to feed the goats and llamas.  We didn’t get far with that cone!  One llama ate the entire cone right out of my hand!  I had Aiden in the other hand, so we both got mugged by that llama.  It was funny though.

We also fed carrots to some goats and donkeys.  Although the animals were hungry, they were very gentle, so no one was bitten while feeding them.  Aiden also got to pet the bunnies, his favorite animal.  He got to play the ubiquitous duck game as well.  Gavin slept the entire time in the Baby Bjorn, but he was under a blanket due to the chilly weather.  It was a nice little outing for a cold Saturday morning.