Flip if you're 4!

Oh, and Levynn spoke like she's 4, too - or maybe 5, or 6, or 7, or who knows.

Mom asked her if she'd like a drink with her snack this afternoon, and Levynn said, "I don't need a drink. Thanks for offering, though."

'Nature in the city,' Mom says

Mom spied a bird building a nest in the ivy atop the fence in our backyard yesterday.

When she looked there today, there were two eggs in the nest.


And when she looked again today, the bird was sitting on them.

Levynn is 4!

UPDATED

You can see that we had a deservedly big day, which we intended to be even deservedly bigger - with dinner and a concert in Millenium Park - but it looked like rain was coming (again) and the kids were pooped. So we called it a night with a delivery from Leona's.

Happy birthday, Levy!

Happy Father's Day 2008

A lot has happened since last Father's Day, when, as Mom's friend Laura reminded us today, we posted a video salute to all the dads.

At the time, this blog was less than a week old, and Lincoln was still in the womb, we still lived in Louisville, we still owned a house, and Levynn had not stepped foot in a classroom without Mom or Dad by her side.

What a year it's been!

So here's to another. Cheers!

Overheard

Dad, Levynn and Lincoln went to one of our local playgrounds this afternoon. Levynn has overcome her trepidation around strange kids (strange as in unknown, not weird), but she ran into a group of big boys there that intimidated her. They might have been 10 years old, and they were running on the equipment and shooting each other with squirt guns. So we left.

Levynn wanted to stop at the other playground, which actually is closer to our house, so we started walking in that direction. Dad told her that there might be a lot of kids there too on such a nice Saturday afternoon in June, "but we'll see how it looks."

To which Levynn replied, "We won't know how it looks until we look at it."

Back to the zoo

We returned to Lincoln Park Zoo yesterday, but this time we met a group there. It was (unofficial) Lakeview YMCA Kiddie Kollege Day, marking the last hurrah for most of them in the program.

The best part was watching Levynn interact with the other kids. She obviously has some buddies.


Kiddie Kollege is offered during the summer, but we decided to give Levynn a break before Pre-K starts in September. However, she will start a T-Ball "class" at the YMCA next week!

Will he yet?

All of a sudden, Lincoln showed an apparent desire to try to crawl this afternoon - emphasis on "try."

Levynn's next school

Or will it be her first "real" school? Either way, it will be a new school.

Levynn officially will attend Coonley Elementary School in September. We registered her for a five-afternoons-a-week Pre-K class there yesterday.

We chose Coonley over Agassiz, which is the one we mentioned here previously. We were offered the Coonley spot late in the process, and several facts about the school won us over. It is undergoing a multi-million dollar makeover this summer and is becoming a Regional Gifted Center - a magnet school for smart kids, in other words (Pre-K is not part of that program). It also is on our street, albeit 14 blocks north.

Attending Pre-K at Coonley probably will not increase the likelihood that Levynn will be able to attend kindergarten there because it's not our neighborhood school. But we all know she's gifted, right?

Why not?

Dad was adding the previous post about the book fair tonight when he heard what sounded like Bluegrass music coming through the front windows. So he peeked outside and, believe it or not, saw three guys and a gal strumming away on a porch across the street!

Overwhelmed with curiosity, Dad walked over there and said, "We moved here from Kentucky recently, and I thought I heard Bluegrass over here."

"Yes, you did," one guy said.

A few moments later, Dad asked, "So why ARE you playing Bluegrass over here?"

And one guy just said, "Why not?"

Indeed, why not!

It turns out that at least one of the guys - Dad didn't stick around for all the details - lives in the apartment on the top floor of that building, and he's a Chicagoan. One of the other guys also is a Chicago native, and the third guy is from Colorado. The gal is from North Carolina.

Stranger, though, is this: The other two people standing on the porch and listening to this quartet are from LOUISVILLE.

What a coincidental day!

Book fair

After two brutal days without air conditioning, forgive us if we're patting ourselves on the back now that we didn't let more heat ruin our plan this morning.

After Levynn's ballet class at the YMCA, we drove downtown, parked in the Tribune lot and rode the bus to the newspaper-run Printers Row Book Fair. It's billed as the largest event of its kind in the Midwest. Held outside, right in the middle of several streets, it included 150 exhibitors (mostly small publishing companies and bookstores), author talks and signings, and a Kids Corner with musical performances and activities.

Guess where we started? In Kids Corner, of course, and we heard a little of Justin Roberts and The Not Ready for Naptime Players (pictured below).


We stopped at a few booths, primarily to satisfy Dad's curiousity, and then stopped along the route to eat lunch curbside at the fancy-schmancy Custom House.

The main library was barely a block from the restaurant, and we walked over there after lunch to cool down and rest. S.E. Hinton (pictured below, roughly), who wrote such famous young-adult novels as The Outsiders and Tex, was signing books in the lobby after receiving the Young Adult Book Prize.


In the children's department, we ran into one of Dad's old college friends, her husband (who was her boyfriend way back then) and their two kids - a 20-month-old boy and a three-year-old girl. They live on the South Side and were in the library for the same reason we were there, which was a wild coincidence.

We decided to head home after that, which meant that we'd leave without any new books - but maybe not without any new friends.