Turning 2!

Two years ago, baby Brayden was born after nearly a full day of labor!  It's been amazing and special watching him figure out the world over these past 2 years!  Happy birthday, Brady - mommy, daddy and Griffey all love you!

Happy 4th of July

This year we were not quite sure what to do because we wanted Brady to see his first fireworks but we were not sure if he could stay up long enough...but who were we kidding, this kid is a trooper.  Our friends Bryan and Kristen came to Chicago to visit Bryan's parents out in the suburbs and invited us to come out there and hang out.  They have a son, Will, who is 1 year older than Brady and a recent addition to their family, Kate, who was 6 months old.  Brady and Will seemed to have a great time.  Bryan's parents had lots of fun toys that Brady could not get enough of.  They had borrowed a pink cadillac from a neighbor that had a motor and a real stereo.  Brady thought it was awesome.  He couldn't reach the pedal, so the neighbor girl came over and took him for a spin.  He loved it until he looked back and saw how far he had gotten from mommy and daddy and started screaming to get out.  The fire truck was also a favorite and had no chance of scaring him.

   After dinner they had a dance off on the patio...which we all enjoyed.

After we ate some hot dogs and burgers, we sat outside and there were lots of neighbors setting off fireworks.  These were Brady's first fireworks because at only 11 months old last year, he definitely couldn't stay up this late.  We would point them out to Brady and soon he started mimicking us and pointing and saying "oh firework" each time he saw one.  It was a really nice evening and we stayed till 11pm with Brady just relaxing on mommy's lap.  He crashed in the car and luckily slept in alittle bit in the morning.  We are so blessed to have such a great little boy.  Overall, a great 4th of July.

Chicago Marathon - October 13th

As mentioned, we got really far behind on the blog - but we're hoping to catch up eventually!  Katie did a few posts of more recent happenings with Brady, who is getting really close to his 2nd birthday.  Maybe that's a good goal - get caught up by the time Brady turns 2.  We'll see.

Last summer, I (Charlie) spent a lot of the warmer months training for the Chicago Marathon.  I had run 2 marathons previously, but the last one had literally been over 7 years ago (the 2007 Cincy Flying Pig Marathon).  I didn't know if I'd ever run a marathon again, so it was a fairly daunting task.  I joined a group called Team in Training (TNT).  I raised nearly $1,500 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma society - thanks to everyone who contributed!

The night before the marathon, TNT had a pre-marathon dinner with the standard past type fare.  I got my carb loading out of the way and also got to play with Brady as he was learning to walk.  He was still in the midst of the "knee-walking" phase at this point, but he was now to the point that he could walk with you holding one of his hands.

The dinner itself was very inspiring.  There was a slide show and a number of cancer survivors spoke to get us pumped up for the big day the next morning.

I woke up at 4:30 in the morning and got all my stuff ready for the run, then took a cab downtown.  Even at 5:45 when I got down there, it was already very crowded downtown.  Being a part of a group like TNT has its benefits for an event like this - they had a spot allocated at a downtown hotel.  The weather was pretty close to ideal for the marathon - but at 5:45, it was still pretty cold.  It was also nice to be able to leave a bag of extra clothes there and not have to worry about finding it later.  We took a group picture and around 6:30 I left to go out to the starting line.

I had a long sleeve shirt on and a bunch of "gu" packets for energy.  I had an old long sleeve shirt on to keep warm that I discarded right after we started.  It was actually an old Winking Lizard shirt from back in my Columbus days!  I won it from drinking a certain number of different craft beers over a few months at the bar back in 2005 - so trading it in for a much more healthy endeavor seemed appropriate.

As I mentioned the weather was close to perfect - a little chilly at the start, and it never got too warm during the run.  I started off at a very conservative pace.  My goal was to run under 10 minute miles, and I started out much slower than that - my first 5k was at about 10:30 pace.  It's extremely crowded early on, and I was sure to get a water or gatorade at each chance - I think they had 18-20 water stations throughout the course.

The race was really fun.  Around 45,000 people ran, which dwarfs the 5-8,000 that ran the Cincinnati and Columbus marathons I'd done previously.  It's literally crowded the whole time.  Even at mile 20, you're practically shoulder to shoulder.  In some ways this is frustrating - I had to do a little more zigging and zagging!  But it's also great for energy, and I needed that.  I didn't stop the whole run, though I really had to fight it around mile numbers 23 and 24.

Katie and Brady went downtown to watch the race with Brady's buddy Eli and parents Rachel and Pete.  Rachel is tall - so that was helpful as I was able to spot them from the crowd.  They were right at the halfway point, and I stopped over to give Brady a quick hug.  He seemed fairly confused with the whole endeavor!

Ultimately, I finished in under 4:20, 4 hours 18 minutes to be exact.  That's about 9:52 per mile, so I was pretty happy with that!  It was a great experience, and worth being sore for the next few days!

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.