Happy Mother's Day

Two weekends ago was Mother's day and I (Katie is writing this one) had a fabulous weekend, the weather was gorgeous and above all I had lots of quality time with my favorite boys.  Sunday morning we all woke up and went to breakfast at one of our favorites here in Chicago, the Southport Grocery and Café.  We got there extra early trying to beat the rush, but this place is so popular that there is even a 45 min wait at 8:30 in the morning.  We brought some snacks for Brady and he enjoyed walking up and down the sidewalks and climbing on the benches.  The food was delicious as always and towards the end Brady was getting restless so Charlie took him outside to walk around while Katie finished up.  This apparently was all part of "the plan" though, because when Katie went outside to meet the restless toddler and daddy, Brady was walking towards me with a big bouquet of flowers.  I wish we could have gotten a picture of it, but believe me it was too cute for words, he was so proud of himself carrying this big bouquet of flowers and was running right towards me giggling and smiling ear to ear.  After our big breakfast, the three of us went to the Lincoln Park Zoo.  This was actually our 2nd annual Lincoln park zoo on Mother's Day and this year was even more fun with Brady pointing at all the animals and making his newly learned animal noises and running up and down the sidewalks.  He knows that cows go "moo", ducks go "quack", birds go "tweet", the polar bear goes "rooaaaarrr"  and when in doubt every other animal goes "roooaaarrr" as well.   We tried to get some pictures, but this kid was so excited and didn't want to stand still very long.  It was such a nice afternoon and after words, we all went home and took a nap.

Becoming a mother has been the best part of my life so far.  It seems like each day I love him more and more.  I am so appreciative to have such a happy and healthy little boy, an awesome and supportive husband who helps out so much with the baby chores, the best and most supportive grand-parents who have helped us so much and the best most ferocious watch dog any one could ask for. 

Here are the only pictures that we could get from the running toddler and since we couldn't get many pictures, here are some older pictures of Brady and his two wonderful grandmothers.

And since we couldn't get many pictures with the running toddler, here are some older pictures of Brady and Manny (that's what his "mommy" sounds like) and his two wonderful grandmas.

Happy Easter

Even though we have quite a bit to catch up on and will get back to those soon, for this post we are fast-forwarding in our blog time-line to present day - Easter.  For this year's Easter weekend, we were blessed with some beautiful weather and took full advantage of it.  Saturday the sun began to shine and we finally got some weather above 50 degrees.  Charlie unfortunately had to go in to work on Saturday but Katie, Griffey and Brady took a long walk around the neighborhood.  After dropping Griffey off at home, Katie and Brady continued to walk to Roscoe Street where all the shops are located because one of the shops was having the Easter Bunny.  Brady was a bit shy at first but then he thought it was quite fun to pick out things off the store shelves and bring them to the Easter Bunny, he even thought it was fun to throw a ball at the Easter Bunny.

And then we tried to sit on the Easter bunny's lap for one picture and this is what we got:

Oh man, makes me feel like a rotten parent, posting this picture and making our little boy sit on the scary Easter Bunny, hopefully I havn't scarred him for life but he bounced back quite quickly with a new dinosaur book and lunch date with mommy.

Saturday night we actually had dinner plans with Brady's best buddy at daycare, Oliver and his parents.   Brady and Oliver have been friends at Daycare for quite awhile now and it is super cute because they get so excited to see each other.  Brady was a little confused when we arrived at the restaurant and saw Oliver there, but Oliver quickly warmed him up by screaming excitedly and waving his hands around and pretty much the whole dinner went like that...the two of them screaming back and forth, giggling and mimicking each other.

Sunday morning, Brady woke up at his usual weekend time of 7:30 and we told him about how the Easter Bunny had come and laid eggs in our basement.  We are not sure if he fully understood our story about the Easter Bunny but he sure liked finding and collecting the eggs and we loved watching him.

After a big breakfast (Katie made a Leslie Mowry speciality - Egg Strata), we all needed a nap and luckily Brady wanted to take one also.  And then after our naps, we headed to Wrigley Field for the Cubs-Reds game and another beautiful day outdoors.  It's amazing how much Brady has changed since his last Cubs game last year when he fell asleep in the Baby Carrier, and now he is clapping (unfortunately to Daddy's dismay he was clapping for the wrong team), dancing to the music, sitting in his own seat (although we still only paid for two )  and wanting to walk up and down the rows......oh the toddler years....how we love this time so much.

We hope everyone that reads this had a wonderful Easter weekend as well.

Learning to walk and Halloween

There seems to always be a theme to our blog, we are always trying to get caught up.

Brady is quite a pro at walking and running now so it seems so strange to think back to the fall of last year when we never thought he was going to get over the "knee walking".  For the longest time, he figured out that he could get places pretty quickly and didn't have to deal with the potential of falling by just walking on his knees.  It was pretty funny.  Thankfully though he gradually started showing interest in standing and took some steps while holding onto things in October (14 months old) and then on Wednesday night October 23rd after work, he decided to take the plunge and walk across the room without holding on to anything.  It was amazing.  We were both so excited for him and we could tell that he was so proud of himself.

First came the "knee walking".....

Then we took our first real steps.....

The following weekend was the weekend right before Halloween, so we had a baby halloween party at our place.  We had several of our friends over that have kids all near Brady's age and showed off their costumes.  It was adorable to watch, but the kids were not too pleased with our idea to line them all up on the couch.

Griffey even had a date for the party (Kirby, which is Kris and Tina and baby Tessa's dog) but was really embarrassed by his costume... 

And then the next day, Roscoe Village had their annual Kids Halloween Parade, where they basically block off the streets and everyone marches down the street a few block in their costumes and the local businesses hand out candy.  The parade was only a block away from our place, so we dressed Griffey up in his police dog shirt and all walked over.  Griffey seemed to like the attention and Brady enjoyed practicing his new walking skills.

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!