Welcome to our Blog

Welcome to our Blog!
We plan to use this Blog to update our friends and families of our new adventures in the Big Apple and New Jersey.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Vegas Baby!

Oh man we are so behind on this blog, but here we go trying to get caught up...again.  So much has been happening and we have been working like crazy, trying to survive this crazy winter and chasing Brady around.  He is so much fun and totally "toddler" and into everything, which makes sitting down to write a blog post more challenging that it use to be:)



Way back in September, we took our first trip away from Brady.....to Vegas.  One of Charlie's friends from KPMG in Columbus who was an usher in our wedding invited us to go to Vegas with him and his wife and a few other couples.  They pretty much planned everything, so it was great to just tag along.  We arrived Thursday evening and stayed 3 nights at The Venetian.  Although it felt a little weird to be away from Brady for the first time, we had a lot of fun.  On Friday night, we went out for a really nice dinner at Joe's Steak and Stone Crab at Caesar's.  After dinner we walked through several of the casinos trying to find the lucky spot to gamble.  Katie wanted to play craps, so we were trying to find a good table for that and ended up landing back at The Venetian tables.  Overall, we pretty much broke even on the gambling which was fine with us because we were just playing the tables for fun.  On Saturday the whole group rented a cabana at the pool which was fully stocked and very fun.  They even had blackjack tables on the pool deck so the guys loved that.

Saturday night, Charlie and I went on our own to the Paris hotel and bought tickets for the Taylor Hicks show.  For those of you that haven't heard of him, he was the season five winner of American Idol and Katie fell in love with his bluesy yet quirky singing style.  He played in a smaller venue inside The Paris hotel, which made Katie kind of sad that he hadn't made it "big" yet but Charlie reminded her that he is probably doing just fine.  It was a great thing to do just the two of us and we both really enjoyed the show.  And because the venue was so small, everyone pretty much got to meet him as you exited the show.  Our favorite song was called "Nineteen", it is a tear jerker but everyone should listen to it....Katie thinks it is going to be on the top of charts.  We told Taylor that we would spread the word, so here is a link to his website and you can listen to our favorite song on his site.
http://taylorhicks.com/




Sunday, February 2, 2014

Brady's first day at Great American Ballpark!

Wow - it's been quite a long time since we posted, so we'll say "happy Super Bowl" to everyone.  We're going to a friend's house for a party tonight, and Brady should have quite a few friends to see there.

We'll try to pick back up where we left off on the blog - but we're quite a few months behind!  The last thing we posted about was Brady's birthday, our move to Roscoe Village, and a visit to Chicago from one of Charlie's friends that involved seeing the Bengals loss to the Bears.  And now we're at the Super Bowl :)

Later in September, Charlie took a little over a week off and spent time in a few different places.  First he went on a golf trip with some buddies down in the Orlando area (Kissimmee, FL, actually).  They go every year, and play Ryder Cup style matches.  This year the matches were at Reunion Golf Resort, which has 3 nice courses.  Unfortunately for Charlie, his team did not defend their title this year - losing "the Cup" on the last hole of the last match.





When he came back, he drove to Ohio to drop Brady off with the grandparents.  We had our first "couples only" weekend since Brady was born planned for the next weekend.  Charlie and Brady stayed in Cincinnati for a few days, and Brady went to Great American Ballpark for his first home Reds game!

Tom, Charlie and Brady represented 3 generations of Reds fans.  We sat by the 3rd base line in some pretty good seats.  Brady seemed to like the seats - for about two innings!  This was much different from previous games.  Brady was in full blown crawling mode, and was "walking" on his knees.  He was also very fond of walking on his feet (with adult help) at this point.  So staying in ballpark seats for a long period of time wasn't his idea of a great time.

He was fine through the second inning, but after that it clearly wasn't going to last much longer.  I was able to bribe him with food to enjoy it to come back for a little while a few times, so we probably saw about 4 innings total.  But we did spend a lot of fun time eating ballpark food and practicing walking in the concourse!

We also took Brady to some Cincinnati institutions - La Rosa's and Graeters!  He liked Half-Day Cafe:


He did not like this sign at Graeter's, however :)



Baseball park info:

Park: Great American Ballpark (Brady's 3rd ballpark)

Score: Mets 1, Reds 0

Winning Pitcher:

Brady's Home team record:  1-4
2 of those home losses were Reds victories in Chicago.  This was the first time Brady saw the Reds lose.  He was devastated!