It's OK, until the baby fusses

Sorry, Mom

No small variety of good eats have been avoided in our home since Mom and Dad first got together many moons ago. If one of us doesn't like it, well, the other's probably not going to get a chance to eat it, either.

Well, times are changing. Dad recently decided that Levynn was old enough to try one of his favorite dishes of all time, and she gamely agreed. So the two of us made an exciting purchase at the grocery store, waited for Mom to go to work one night, and cooked it to golden perfection.

And?

"Mmm, mmm, mmm," Levynn declared as she asked for seconds and thirds. "I love fish sticks!"

welcome inside

Welcome to our home

At long last, the tour by photo:



from sidewalk, our gated entry, above



ours is the door on the left, goes right into our first floor unit. on the right opens into stairway to upstairs owners/neighbors. looking north down our street, below



from the back yard, our deck is the lower one



path between our house and the neighbor to our south (front of ours faces east). path goes to our backyard, basement access this way, and straight back to garage and another gate to rear alley.

This can't be Louisville!

Snow fell on Chicago for more than 24 hours beginning Thursday morning, and Levynn might not have been the only person who hadn't seen so much of it.


Yes, sir, it's still coming down!

Our upstairs neighbor, the good landlord that he is, shoveled the property just as he has after each snowfall since we moved here. He had more work to do this time, but he had a little helper.


Dad and Levynn packed on the gear this morning and went outside to have some fun.


Dad made a snow angel (above), and Levynn got stuck in the depths (below).



Dad wanted to know just how much snow was on the ground.


A foot!

Before we called it a day, we decided to take the slide from the little playset Levynn got for her first birthday and sled along the sidewalk with it.

This will make you laugh and laugh!

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.