December 2013 in Columbus-Visiting Friends and Family

All these Christmas posts are really getting me (Katie is writing this one) excited for Christmas this year.  To follow up on the most recent post, after we spent some time in Eaton, we went to Columbus for a few days to see friends and Peter and his family.
We first went to see Peter and Becca and the kids and wow it is crazy how time is flying and how much older they are all getting.  Little Tommy was 9 years old last Christmas. It was fun seeing them again and opening presents.

Afterwords, we went to see Katie's college friends, Sarah, Cathy, Lisa, Ashley with husbands and kids.  Cathy and Joey had just moved into a new house in Plain City (outside of Dublin) and had just had new baby, Max.  It was so much fun seeing everyone and meeting the newest Labyrinth baby.  Brady loved chasing their dog around the table, the kids had a dance party in the living room to Gangnam Style and then Brady had a party in the bath tub with Lily and Zane.

From Left to Right (Elliot, Brady, Zane, Lily, Parker)
Elliot and Parker are twins born a week after Brady, Zane and Lily are year older than Brady and the twins.

Just three bengals fans, getting along.

And we also made some time to stop over and see our good friends, the Rost's who had also just had their 2nd child.  Brady and their son Will are about a year apart and Brady loved his train table.

Christmas 2013 in Ohio

We made our way to Cincinnati for Christmas at the Mowry's after Charlie wrapped everything up for work.  In what has become an annual tradition, we went to the Wyoming Presbyterian Church for Christmas Eve.  Brady was not nearly as quiet as he had been the year before; instead of falling asleep on Charlie, we had to bring him out to the play area as he was trying to squirm around and show off his newfound powers of walking!

Brady also got to see some old Wyoming folks - like the Bartells, Charlie's friend's parents.  Paul was playing the violin as part of the service - and Brady was intrigued by that!

After church we continued the tradition of dinner at the Mowry's house.  The Caricos, Grumpa, Grandma Dorothy, Abby and us all enjoyed a nice meal put together by Leslie (and Tom said the prayer!).

Christmas morning, we woke up and opened presents.  This was the first time Brady was mobile and really able to participate.  He didn't completely understand everything - the act of opening the presents often was more exciting than the present itself!

Of course, a fun time was had by all...

Movies are the popular theme for Christmas night for us; Charlie and Mom went to the Hobbit, while the rest of the family went to see Saving Mr. Banks - the Disney movie about the Mary Poppins author.  

The next day, we went to Eaton for Christmas with the Caricos.  Brady loved his presents, there as well.  He particularly liked the stuffed animal dog he got - it was much bigger than him!

Also, he really liked playing with things at Bob and Sue's house.  The train tracks around the Christmas tree were a harbinger of things to come as far as his love of trains!  He also loved playing the piano downstairs, and dancing to the TV upstairs!

We stayed in Eaton for a few days, then headed to Columbus to see some friends up there.  But that's for the next post!

November 2013

We are practically a whole year behind on this blog, but we are going to try to get caught up since we have done all these fun things with Brady and our family - and it will be nice to document it.  We'll try to do most of these posts by month.  This one is for November.

On the weekend of November 9th, we went back to Columbus for a wedding with some KPMG Columbus friends.  One of Charlie's old bosses, Mike, was getting married and it was a blast because our entire old KPMG crew was there.   Katie's parents came up to Chicago to stay with Brady and Griffey.  I wish we had some pictures from this night, but unfortunately we couldn't only find this one.

The next weekend - November 16th - Charlie's parents came up and got us all tickets to the Northwestern vs. Michigan football game.  We got a babysitter for Brady and the 4 of us took the "El" up to Evanston for the game.

All I remember is the weather turned very cold and rainy and it was a close but ugly game.  Charlie had to help with the recap - but basically, we basically neither team got close to scoring a touchdown and Michigan kicked a field goal as time expired to tie the game 9-9.  That meant overtime.  Katie (and even Michigan graduate Leslie!) were really just hoping that the game didn't go into overtime so that we could get out of the rain.  But overtime turned out to be very exciting, and Michigan ended up winning 27-19 in triple overtime!  It was an interesting experience - there were as many Michigan fans there as Northwestern fans, which is about what Charlie remembered from the time he went to an Ohio State game in Evanston.

On the way back, there were a lot of people getting on the El and somehow we lost Tom.   He got stuck behind a group of people and didn't make it on the same train as us.   Luckily, he found his way back home, but we were worried about him for a while.

Wedding in DC

This post is long over due but the pictures are just too cute to pass this one up.

The weekend of October 5th, we took Brady on his first flight. One of Charlie's fraternity brothers was getting married in Washington DC and luckily Maggie, one of Katie's best friends from college lives in the DC area so we decided to bring Brady and stay with Maggie on Friday night.  Maggie has 2 kids and offered to let Brady have a sleep-over at her house and let us stay downtown and enjoy the wedding reception, which was so nice of her and I think a lot of fun for Brady.

We were very nervous about how Brady would act on the flight, but overall he was very good.  On the flight out to DC, he was pretty excited and only got a litttle scared when the flight was taking off.  When the flight was taking off, we noticed that his eyes were getting kind of big and wondering what was going on...so we started singing the Pajanimals song (the TV show that we watch each night before bed).  Every episode, the Pajanimals hop on one of their beds and fly off to a magical land and sing.  Once Brady heard us singing this, he seemed to relax, which was good.

We got into DC around dinner time on Friday night and Maggie picked us up from the airport.  After eating some dinner and catching up, we were all pretty tired.  Saturday morning, Charlie went for a run because he was training for the marathon and Katie and Brady went with Maggie and her youngest one, Abby, to her ballet class.  Brady especially loved crashing the little girls' ballet class and was using the ballet bar to practice his walking.   All the little girls in their tutu's and Brady trying to bombard their class, was totally adorable.

Saturday evening we left Brady with Maggie and her family to have a home made pizza party and went downtown for the wedding.  And Maggie's oldest, Timmy, was such a good host and showed Brady the ropes...including how to build the best lego projects.  Brady just loved it.

The wedding was gorgeous at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and luckily the government shut-down that was happening at the time didn't impact the wedding, although we heard many other monuments and popular wedding venues had been affected by the government shut-down.  We had a great time at the wedding and stayed at the historic Willard Hotel right across from the White House.

 Sunday we picked up Brady and headed back to Chicago.  The flight back was a little more rough for Brady since we tried to muscle right through nap time.  He was getting pretty cranky on the flight and Katie thought maybe he needed a diaper change so she brought him to the tiny bathroom on the plane but Brady was not having it and hated the claustrophobic  bathroom and small changing table, which I don't blame him.  He was screaming at the top of his lungs until the diaper change was over.  He finally calmed down though and fell asleep on our lap.

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/

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!

Brady's Birthday Party Weekend

In late July we were preparing to move from Lakeview to Roscoe Village, but we had a special day to prepare for on the first day of August!  Our little baby...

...turned 1 year old!

We had his birthday party down in Cincinnati at Charlie's parents house.  We left Chicago late on Friday, August 2nd and got down to Cincy late that night.  We were tired when we woke up, but also very excited for the big day.  There was quite a bit of preparation to do.  We had to get the cake:

And Charlie and Tom had to head to Party City to get the decorations:

And then we had to do some setting up (or, from this picture, it looks like at least Leslie did some setting up):

There were a lot of people coming to the party.  Charlie's Uncle Jim and Aunt Nancy (now Great Aunt and Uncle!) were in all the way from Oregon.  Brady seemed excited!

Katie's parents Bob and Sue came over for the part as well, and so did Brady's Great Grandpa Chuck.  We had the party out on the front porch, and the weather was very cooperative!

Some of our college friends who live in Cincy came as well.  Katie's friend Lisa came, and Charlie's friends Travis, Craig, and Denny also came.  

Denny's wife Tracy had just had their baby Hank a few months earlier, so it was neat to see their little one.  

And of course Griffey came with us.  He didn't know what to do about all this commotion, but he behaved very well.  Of course the star of the day was Brady!  And he was decked out in party gear.

He enjoyed getting presents, and the most interesting one for us was the action figure of "The Miz", which was given by Travis.  The Miz was a former fraternity brother of Charlie's who is now a WWE wrestler - and has done well enough to have his own action figure!

After opening presents, the next thing was, naturally, the cake!  We sat the cake down in front of him, and at first, Brady was bit unsure.

But by the end, he had made quite a mess of himself and consumed a little too much sugar!

After the party, our family watched Brady while we went with Tracy, Denny, and Lisa to a small local brewery near Charlie's parents house - Rivertown Brewery.  It's a very new brewer that had some good tasting beers.  All in all, it was a great day and we were happy to celebrate it with so many family and friends!