how to win

On Saturday, Jill rode to the farmers' market for our weekly stash of fruit and croissants. On the way home, she stopped by a garage sale and bought a wagon full of blocks for Clara. $3 well spent.

There haven't been enough pictures of Jill lately. So here's another. She keeps on being super mommy. Today, she pulled the kids on her bike to my office, and we all ate lunch at Papa Del's. Mmmmm.
Janny smiles and laughs and grabs toys with her hands.
But I want to talk about Clara.

Some 2 months ago, she took apart our toilet paper dispenser, and one of the 3 parts disappeared. Jill and I looked to no avail. Today, Clara was playing with the remaining two pieces, so Jill asked her to find the other piece and then went off to work on something. When she returned, Clara was playing with all 3 pieces. She wouldn't say where she hid that piece.

She loves to enunciate the 'k' sound at the end of words. MilKKKK, blocKKKK, stucKKKK, socKKKK. She also said 'poopy' this week.

She knows the number 2. She's very happy about this. When she holds 2 balls, she says '2 balls'. Same with 2 pieces of pasta or 2 blocks. Strangely, she also says '2 mommy' and '2 daddy' while pointing at one of us. I take that to mean that we each do the work of 2 mommies and daddies. It has to be a compliment, right?

In the last post I mentioned the link between physical contact and team success. TCBC's A softball team increased the giving of high 5's, and we won for the 2nd time this season. Coincidence?

center of the universe

Here's Jill's new hairstyle. It's very cute.

On Saturday, the whole family rode our bikes to Philo, IL, aka the center of the universe, also boyhood home of David Foster Wallace (according to his book of essays, though I wonder if he actually grew up in Urbana. I'll keep checking into this). It seems that Philoians prefer the former title as it's printed on their water tower. We saw no signs about DFW.

Our destination was Philo's only restaurant, the Philo Tavern. Normally, I get the steak sandwich (recommended by Mike Ditka during the year the Bears played in Champaign), but the daily special was bbq pork sandwich. The bonus special added cheese and bacon to the bbq, and yes, that's what we both got. You could make a good argument against doing so because we only rode about 8 miles to get there.

Janny keeps getting sweeter. She sometimes sleeps through the night. Just today, she started to giggle for Jill.
Prior to the bike ride, we watched Matt and Jaime's kids while they were house hunting. It was very fun to see Nathaniel shuffling around on his own.
Clara loves playing with these blocks. She says 'block' and drags either me or Jill to her small table. She points to the chair that we need to sit in ('daddy' or 'mommy'), and then we build something. Too fun! By the way, I forgot to note when it happened, but Clara calls us mommy and daddy rather than momma and dadda.

We lost another softball game but played decently well. Recently, I read an article that noted a correlation between physical contact (high 5's, chest bumps, etc.) and team performance. I sent an email to the team suggesting that we work on this. If it works, we may have to go further. Brotherly kisses, anyone?

dedicated

Already we're starting a new weekend, but I'm still catching up from last weekend. We had Janny's dedication at church, so we invited some family to come celebrate with us. Many came. In fact, we had to borrow John and Nancy's house (they were away for the weekend) to house everybody.

We had the honor of hosting Janny's namesake, Aunt Jan. See any resemblance?

Janny is the happiest 3 month old baby in the world right now. You know who is happy about that? Us.

Check out the kids' table. Yup, that's Clara sitting with the 'big' kids eating her lunch.
We didn't do a whole lot away from the house. We had a blast hanging out in the backyard with bike parades, chasing, wagon pulling, and basketball playing. Late Sat afternoon we went to the park near County Market for some playground and wiffle ball. Perhaps 8 other kids at the park joined in on the game. Miko had the best swing, but I enjoyed Xavier's overhand-one-armed approach. Hitting the ball in this manner is not easy.
Here's the whole crew after church. We took up 2 1/2 rows in our usual back-corner. Serious representation.
Our softball team went through a dry spell, but we have played much better the last 2 weeks. We didn't win, but we didn't lose by double digits. I slumped a little bit during those games, but swung the bat better this week (3 for 4 (all singles though)). We've still only won one game, but watch out for us in the playoffs!

Finally, I interviewed this week for a promotion at work. I'll find out results in a month or so.

Double finally, Jill restyled her hair!