Snapshots

Trying out their gardening gifts from the Easter Bunny on a sort of cold Easter morning...


Here's one of Brendan and my brother Danny. I think they look a lot alike...

The Magical Mystery Tour

I used to love winter, then I hated it, now I'm starting to like it again. Mostly because LT and BP like it, and there are fun things to do in winter that you can't do otherwise, and I actually dress properly for the temps and we take vacations to break up the monotony. A couple weeks ago we took an unexpected trip to San Francisco for "work related reasons" which I might expound upon in another post. But anyway it was fun and we spent two nights in Sunnyvale and two in San Fran. There are no sea lions in San Fran anymore, btw. They jumped ship and no one really knows why. We did get to go to one of our favorite restaurants, The Stinking Rose which is also in LA but not nearly as good there so only go to the one in San Fran. But be warned they do NOT have the awesome sparkling lemonade of yore. Sigh. Liam slept through that delicious dinner, which is a rarity for him these days, but just being a two hour time change really threw off both the kids.

That little change ended up being the worst part of the trip, because they were both sort of off the whole time and so there were more moments of fussiness and tantrums for all of us. Still, you just can't say too many bad things about being somewhere in February that feels like spring and requires only a light jacket. We went outside a LOT, which was fantastic, and while Eric was working on Friday I took the boys about an hour south to the Monterey Bay Aquarium It was fun and on the ocean and insanely expensive, and nice to see but it also made me appreciate the Shedd a little more, because the Shedd really compares to this renown place. We also went to the Muir Woods which required a drive across the Golden Gate bridge and that's always a little trippy.

When we lived in LA we didn't get up to San Fran too often, and now I wish we had gone more. I also can kind of vaguely see what people like about nature, though I still would not venture into it if it weren't for Eric and the kids. Oh, and really most profound of all was the realization that, yet again, we do not have enough frozen yogurt establishments in this great Chicagoland area and why not??? Why not? It's not because it's too cold, because we have plenty of ice cream and yucky frozen custard places, so what is the problem? Ok, enough about that. Oh and also Eric and I went to what had been our favorite coffee chain in LA and we still order drink kits from there but it made me realize that it wasn't all that I remembered it to be and many of the things I think I would like to go back and do again I just wouldn't because they're not the same at all when you have kids. For instance we couldn't sit at our favorite Westwood restaurant for 4 hours and eat shwarma and smoke hookahs and drink turkish coffee and relax. We just couldn't do it anymore. It wouldn't be the same and if we didn't have a babysitter with us it wouldn't even be remotely possible. And the thing is I don't even care and so I guess in some strange way I've gotten older. Again.

Something I learned by accident on this trip, and I don't know why I didn't know it before, but for the Tips for Traveling with Kids - when you go somewhere and the view isn't important, get a room on the first floor. The hotel where Eric's work had put us up assigned us a gigantic room on the first floor, which meant Liam and Brendan could run around and not bother people in the room below us, and it was awesome. In San Fran we had a higher level floor, which was great because they could watch all the goings on out the windows - definitely a must for big cities. But in Sunnyvale there's nothing to see so having the first floor was primo. For some reason the Marriott in San Fran upgraded us to a suite so for the 2nd two nights we also had a giant place and it was great so that the kids could have space. We're going to Champaign this week for my semester on campus visit, and I booked a suite there for the first time thinking I was a super genius, but now I know I have to also ask for a, you guessed it, first floor suite. Speaking of my oncampus visit I need to go and do some schoolwork now. Oh, and on a seemingly unrelated point if you ever have a child who doesn't sleep, definitely take a visit to a pediatric sleep doctor. It is one of the best things we have ever done in our lives. Great timing with a newborn on the way haha but I will take my 3 months of sleep anyway.

Ah, I Can See Clearly Now

Liam and Brendan know who the president and vice president are, and who the first president was. At the beginning of the State of the Union Address a week or two ago, I was finishing up class and Eric was doing something and so Liam and Brendan were the first ones to watch the tv. Then Liam started to excitedly announce, "George Washington is saying Barack Obama is there!" So I went over to see what he was talking about, and sure enough I saw an older man who was announcing the president. So I told Liam, oh that's not George Washington and went on to explain how he lived a long time ago blah blah blah. But I thought we'd already covered this before. Anyway it's sort of come up a few other times and then after a while Liam seemed to accept that GW doesn't live nowadays, but he seemed to wrestle with it. Then this morning the source of his confusion became clear to me. He said, "You know what, Mom. When George Washington got into that helicopter and flew away, I think he flew up into heaven, and that's why he's not around anymore." Wha-? Oh! Oh I get it now! You are thinking of George Bush, from the inauguration! That's a different person than George Washington, though he was also our president. Just not our first president. And you're right, he still is alive now.
It's no use explaining, parents just don't understand.

The Little Vacation That Could(n't, Did)

On Friday Eric and I decided to take an impromptu trip downtown with the little guys. The Marriott had great rates and we could get 5000 bonus points while enjoying our skyline view of the city from our 38th floor windows, so why not, right? The plan was to leave right after Eric got off of work at 4:30. We made reservations at the Buca by the hotel for 5:45. But, true to form, Brendan decided to take a very short nap, after which he came downstairs and fell asleep at 4:20. Liam, who doesn't take a nap anymore, took a nap at 3:30. Eric and I tried to quickly pack up our two backpacks without forgetting any of the many things we would probably forget, and then we woke up the boys. Liam was an utter wreck. Really. I can sympathize, because I often feel like that after naps, but I think I deal with it better. By the time we got out the door it was 5:00. When we were still waiting to get through the Cumberland toll at 5:45 we changed the reservation to 6:30. When we weren't even at Irving Park Road by 6:15 we called and canceled the reservation and tried to think of somewhere we could go off the expressway. Did I mention we are trying to have the boys in bed and asleep by 8:30? Eric thought of a few places but I wanted to get further into the city. An exit or two before Nagle Brendan really wanted to get out of the car (where we'd been for an hour and a half.) We offered fruit snacks and Liam was in but Brendan said no. Brendan never says no to fruit snacks. Soon we found out why, because about 30 seconds later he starting throwing up all over. Awesome! Apparently he is unused to driving in stop and go traffic and he got car sick. Boy did he ever. The same thing happened to Liam when he was about Brendan's age and I was going into the city at about the same time of day to meet up with some AmeriCorps friends. I forgot about the traffic, but that didn't help at this point. Anyway, there was no way we could clean Brendan off and put him back in the car seat, which along with his clothes took the brunt of the disaster. So we pulled off at Nagle, took all his clothes off (fortunately he was not wearing his coat - thank you God!) and washed him off (yes, it was 30 degrees), took the clothes and the car seat to some alley trash area, and I sat in the back with Brendan on my lap while we went to the Addison Target and bought a booster seat for Liam. Crisis averted. By the time we got downtown at 7:40 we were still able to get right in to Buca, and then we went back to the hotel, explored a little, skipped the pool and went back to our room. Brendan fell asleep relatively easily because Eric and I were there and he was tired. Eric and I decided to watch tv and Liam decided to join us. Late night tv is not appropriate for 4 year olds, but Liam really loved Conan. I'm with him. Conan's way better than Jay Leno, and I'm glad Liam has such good taste. He laughed at all the right places even though he had no idea what they were talking about. I fell asleep during Craig Ferguson (who in my humble opinion is the absolute best talk show host beside Johnny Carson, hands down), which may seem like a sort of dull vacation, but for me and Eric it was blissful. We almost never get to watch tv and almost never get to fall asleep when we want to. The next morning we woke up, went to breakfast, went to the pool, picked up some delicious Thai from Lincoln Square, picked up Liam's bday party cake for his kids' birthday party tomorrow, and got home by 2:30. I'm so happy we decided to chuck the car seat and go on with the trip. It might seem wasteful but actually that car seat was almost at the end of it's life as it was, so it would have been gone soon anyway. We were most disappointed about the cool pants Brendan had on, but we had no where to keep them until we went home the next day, so c'est la vie. Oh, and Liam and Brendan were both amazing in the pool and they met a friend, Megan, who Liam wanted to invite back to our room. I don't know if it's preschool or what but he's really coming out of his shell a lot more, and Brendan has been getting all shy and clingly. So I guess these are all just stages. And so too hopefully is Brendan's dreadful dreadful sleep. Hopefully next week we'll have some better game plan for that. But for right now we just have Liam's final 4th birthday party tomorrow. Who thinks I'll remember to bring the camera?

There Were Five in the Bed

On Saturday Eric and I went for the big ultrasound reveal. Liam and Brendan were at their grandparents' and we had a whole late morning and afternoon to ourselves, which is a seemingly very, very painfully rare event lately. The ultrasound went well, the baby looked good, and apparently looked like a boy. I was surprised, because I thought he was a girl, but if there's one thing I've learned about being a mom it's that kids never ever do what you expect them to. After the appointment we got massages, and then, instead of doing even one of the 6.12 million things we were planning on doing, we just drove to a random Indian restaurant on Devon and had a delicious lunch. Because we could. I still ate it about twice as fast as I needed to, being so unused to getting to sit down and eat slowly and relax and enjoy my meal, but mmmm.
For about the last two months Brendan has been sleeping so badly through the night that he now wakes up Liam, who then has a hard time getting back to sleep because of the hypothetical monsters that he knows probably don't exist but still possibly might. It's been brutal, I'm not going to lie. We have tried pretty much everything you could think of, and nothing has worked. So today, after an incredibly stressful, no good horrible awful night last night, we are going to try and enlist the help of a pediatric sleep specialist. I have about 5% hope for a positive solution, but after more than 2 years and 3 months where we've only gotten maybe, maybe 10 full nights of sleep, I'm out of ideas.
On a more positive note Brendan and Liam surprise and astound me every day with how freaking funny and smart they are, and how good they can now play with each other (well and fight too, which is a wholly new concept to me having never had a sibling anywhere near my own age, but apparently it's normal though I still hate it and constantly try and crush it out. It's not bad but I just want them to never fight, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.) Both of them are sharp as tacks and are phenomenally good talkers, so I just love to sit back and listen to their conversations. Liam had set the bar so high with his verbal skills I really didn't expect Brendan to match up to him, but there again I was so wrong. And he is actually a much clearer talker, but to my great surprise, similar to Liam, he will not perform on command, will usually not continue to do what he's doing if I get out the camera, and often quiets down when we go out in public. Not always, but a lot. So I guess some Eric genes did make it into him after all.
Last week we finally started getting our basement finished. We are very very excited about this, even though it's a pretty small basement, but having another room in the house is becoming increasingly important. I really want to leave some of the brick exposed down there, which we're not planning on doing right now, but aside from that it's the coolest thing to walk down in what had always been the dungeon and see it transforming into a cool place. After that the only other renovation we have left for the main house is the upstairs bathroom. Of course once we complete that, if we stay in this house, we will then need to think about the plans for an addition. And I say, why not sink more money into a place that depreciates a little more each day? What's there to lose? I mean, beside our house and all our money and everything but the clothes on our back, right? This is America, for God's sake!
I have recently discovered that overall I have a pretty idyllic life, which is a good thing to realize every now and then. You really can't beat having a husband/Dad who works from home, a wife/Mom who works part time 5 blocks away, two terribly-sleeping but otherwise ideal sons who make even winter a ton of fun, and a house with something changing every day. Now, if I could somehow just manage to schedule one of those prenatal massages into my week EVERY week...

Sugar Sugar, Awwww Honey, Honey

Brendan's favorite foods:
sausage
hot dogs
sausage
hot dogs
bananas (which he calls band-aids, ew.)
yogurt covered raisins
dried bananas
dried cherries
fruit snacks
vitamins
cheese
sausage
maraschino cherries (which irks me to no end since it is very hard to find ones without high fructose corn syrup)

It's not exactly the well-rounded diet I'm striving for with him. He also does NOT like:
dessert (except Hershey bars)
honey (which he pretends he does like, like Tigger, and then he remembers he hates, like Tigger)
peas
tea (yes, I tried this when he had a cough)
pretty much most things not on the "favorite" list
Liam pretty much likes everything EXCEPT coconut and whipped cream (he gets that from me.) I still haven't taken good pictures of them from Halloween, but my friend's sister did so I need to get them from her. Also I am not beneath dressing them up in their costumes again to get a couple posed shots. They are adorable.
Eric and I saw the absolutely ONLY possible movie available on Friday night at it was Couples Vacation. It was not as bad as I was expecting. I was expecting very bad. But I love Vince Vaughn so right there it got a star, and then the setting was AMAZING so there's another star, and there were some funny moments, so there's a half star, so 2.5/5 stars. Also I haven't seen more than maybe 3 or 4 movies at the theatre this year so I'm pretty forgiving. I mean I purposefully try not to go to something which I know I will hate, which I never cared about before when I could and did see movies whenever I had the whim, which was often. Eric and I made the mistake of going to see The Women once, but realized our mistake literally 4 minutes into the film and relocated to Burn After Reading, which is the sort of evasive maneuver you have to do when using up the only 2 1/2 hour break you're going to have for 3 months. Anyway, I have noticed my standards slipping big time in my quest for pure unadultered escapism. But I'm ok with that. I think enough right now between kids and work and school that I'm ok taking a break from David Lynch. I wish there were a few more quality escape films, but I think I'd have to live in the 40s and 50s for that to be the case. Thank you Netflix.

Go Speedracer Go

Liam wants to be a racecar driver. He wants his racecar to have a fishtank in the back too. So it seemed only natural to take him to a real race. Last weekend we went to Elkhart Lake, WI with Eric's brother Andy and his girlfriend Erin. The resort was beautiful and the cars were very cool and even the Bears Packers game at the Wisonsin dive bar was fun. Unfortunately Brendan came down with a cold our second night there (and we didn't know it yet but Liam did too.) Vacations with kids are different. I personally like to go somewhere with little expectations, no itinerary and maybe only a vague idea of what I want to do. With Liam and Brando there's about 6 extra suitcases to bring and at least some preparation is vital. Unfortunately you never think of bringing humidifiers, do you? So, bedtime. Brendan was having a hard time falling asleep with the cold so Eric was in with him and I was watching a very strange show on the History channel about, you guessed it, the antichrist. It was a Nostradamus thing that normally I wouldn't have watched, but what roped me in was this weird teaser they kept offering that seemed to imply our president might be the "3rd and final" antichrist. They even went so far as to have an actor who slightly resembled the prez who they'd show every time they proposed their ominous questions, "Could this third and final antichrist be an intelligent, popular, charismatic man who leads a nation to glory just before he destroys the world forever?" It was so strange and filled with so much overt innuendo that I just had to keep watching to see how they were going to finish it. At this point either way would be bizarre. If they said "no it's definitely not our president" then why did they keep alluding to him as if he was, and really how could they say that with any authority since it's all a bunch of mumbo jumbo anyway. The conspiracy theorists would have a field day with that. If they said it is him or could be him that would be sooooo incredible it doesn't seem possible. So how would it end? I literally sat through 45 minutes of this show and then just when they were going to get to the bottom line, Brendan wakes up inconsolable and needing me and so I didn't get to watch the end. Unbelievable. Conspiracy, right?
So around midnight Brendan woke up with this 3-packs-of-Camels-a-Day cough, the likes of which I'd never heard before. Well, had we been at home I would have put on the humidifier and if it was bad I would have brought him into the bathroom with the hot shower arunnin. No humidifier, but I ran the hotel hot shower and sure enough he stopped coughing and fell back asleep. Eric went down to the front desk to get some extra pillows for Brando (didn't want to have them bring them up and knock on the door and wake everyone) and I asked him to leave the shower running so the noise would be in the background til he came back. Sure enough less than one minute after Eric left the fire alarm in our room goes off. We had a 3 bedroom setup with a kitchen and dining room and the three bedrooms were all clustered in the back. This insane blasting alarm would not shut off, and a minute later the front desk calls to see what's going on. I explain what happened and ask how to turn it off. "Just open the patio door" was their reply. Great idea, but all it did was cause dozens of worried hotel guests to start looking out their doors and windows wondering if the building was on fire. Erin and Andy came out of their bedroom and we all tried to make it shut off. Liam and Brendan somehow slept through it, in spite of it being a foot away from each of their open doors and it literally stayed on for 10 or 15 minutes. Finally Andy pulled it out of the ceiling. A minute later Eric came back, unaware of what had happened. Then the front desk tells us we have to put the smoke detector back in or the Fire Department's going to come. It was really a joyful experience, especially when after everyone was back to sleep Liam started crying at the top of his lungs because his cold finally set in and he felt awful but was so tired the only thing he could do was cry. I think Eric and I maybe got two hours of sleep that night, and we woke up before 7, packed up our stuff and left before Erin and Andy even got up.
Then I kept Liam home from his 4th and 5th days of preschool. On Thursday he seemed much better and I thought he was ready to go back. He definitely wanted to and I didn't think he seemed contagious (bear in mind that I ABHOR when people bring their sick kids anywhere near me or my kids, so I would not want to be a hypocrite but I really felt like he was ok.) I went to work and Eric called saying he wasn't sure if Liam should go. I'm like "I think he's fine and should go, but it's up to you." So based on my prodding Eric decided to send him. On the way back from dropping him off Eric calls to tell me that yes Liam went to school but the weird thing was that the class won't be going outside and they're canceling the ice cream social because there's an escaped convict on the loose in the neighborhood so the school's on lockdown. Well didn't I feel great for convincing Eric to let him go.
Alls well that ends well. I actually feel sort of sorry for the convict because he knew he was probably going to be sent to prison for the next decade plus, so when he saw an easy opportunity to escape he did it, and in all the time he was on the lam he didn't hurt anyone. I read someone saying he hopes he "goes to jail for the rest of his life" which I think is absurd, considering murderers don't even always go to jail for the rest of their lives. I think it's just a sad commentary on our penitentiary system, when the guys ends up in jail for nonviolent crime at age 18, and he just goes back and forth between jail and freedom for the rest of his life. Really isn't there any way we could help first offenders not end up back in jail? Of course some people won't be reformed, but our overcrowded prisons are probably the worst thing you could do for people gone astray. The whole system's a mess, that's my opinion. Anyway thank God everything ended peacefully and safely. And on a happier note, Liam sent his first text message today. Eric got a new phone after a wayward load of laundry did in his old and much beloved phone. This one has a keypad which intrigues Liam, and all on his own he texted me and my niece Kelly a message. He wanted to also text our babysitter but she's only 12 and doesn't have a cell phone. What was his message? "Liam" Succinct, just like he is.