The first of many together

well, one day Dad won't be in there, too, but you know what we mean.

Universe Star

We began December with grand plans to see Chicago's many museums while we were living downtown. But our apartment search dragged longer than we anticipated, the month passed quickly, and we only got to the children's museum and the aquarium before it was over.

Thankfully, the city offers many incentives to draw you back down there, like free days and weeks and even months at certain institutions and a library pass that can get a family of four into any of them for free on any given day.

The Adler Planetarium, which bills itself as America's first such facility, was free all of last week. So we decided to go there on Friday. Mom and Dad weren't even sure what it would have to offer a 3-year-old. But Levynn liked it!

It was a legitimate museum with a building full of exhibits and shows, including a 3-D video about the Milky Way that couldn't have had a more impressed visitor all day than our girl. Balancing the oversized 3-D glasses on her nose, she gushed "Whoa" and "Wow" when the heavenly bodies seemed to shoot toward us, and she tried to grab them out of the air. No one else even made a peep. Dad thoroughly enjoyed that.

In the video below, which was filmed one day later, Levynn shows a little of what she learned. And yes, the ball-in-frisbee was 100-percent her own idea.

Yes, Lincoln is still growing

At his six-month checkup last week, Lincoln was 18 pounds and 28 3/4 inches. He has pushed into the 95th percentile for height. And the doctor gave us the green light to feed him more than rice cereal. He's enjoying mushed carrots as he stares at the camera in this photo.

New Year's over Navy Pier

The much anticipated fireworks shows were a bit of a bust. It was so foggy for the 7 p.m. family show that almost nothing was visible. Then we discovered, after the fog had cleared for the midnight show, that we wouldn't have seen any fireworks from our windows anyway because they were shot too far off Navy Pier and were behind the building in front of us. So Levynn didn't get to see a thing. She was very disappointed.

Dad went outside with John and his girlfriend for a short time to take a few photos of the midnight show. Note the shot of the cars on Lakeshore Drive. Only one, the blur, was moving; the rest were parked right there on the road for a good view. And that edifice on the right side of the other two shots - that's the building blocking our good view.

A child's eye view

Levynn took that photo - of a cup on her placemat, with our realtor in the background - with a neat gift from our friend John. He's a toy man at VTech, and he gave her the company's kids' camera, the Kidizoom, a couple months ago. It's predictably low-tech but does the job just fine for her.

She breaks it out now and then to snap some shots, and Dad decided to finally download them to the computer today. He stumbled upon the below photos, which Levynn took during our life-changing drive from Louisville to Chicago on the first weekend of December. Pretty cool!

Don't worry, these won't be the last you see.

We're still here!

We've been experiencing some frustrating Internet problems since we moved into our new apartment (Comcast is horrible!), but we seem to be back online for the long haul now. So we'll update this baby (with a bunch of goodies) very soon.