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!

Memorial weekend zoo trip

To celebrate Memorial weekend in style, we decided to take a trip to the zoo in Bloomington on Sat. I can't remember the last time we left town (Christmas? Maybe i should check the blog archives?). Btown is only 45 minutes away, so this was a nice way to build up to some upcoming adventures.

Below, Jill and Clara pose outside the sun bear's cage. The sun bear is my favorite animal at the zoo, a happy looking guy in continual search of fun. We had just waited out a monster thunderstorm inside the rain forest room.

We invited the list of friends on our 707 cafe list, and Matt and Jaime and kids answered the call. This worked out great as Jaime led us to a great Italian family restaurant for lunch. Oddly U-C has nothing like this -- Fazzoli's doesn't cut it, and the other Italian places are fancy-style.
On the way to Pontiac for a talk about water treatment in the oil industry, coworker Dave and I discussed big vs. small zoos. He argues that only large cities have economies of scale to have zoos. I argue that there must be a way to have a successful small zoo. Granted, many animals cannot be considered (e.g., elephants), and fewer animals can be in the zoo at any time. But why not rotate different animals in and out every 3-6 months. Then people might be interested in coming more often. Wouldn't this work? By the way, he suggested that we go to Indy's zoo, but not this weekend because they opened a huge new exhibit and were expecting large crowds. Again, this seems to argue for my opinion, no?

Also on that drive, we passed by a wind farm. Neither of us had been up close to one before, so I drove our survey's hybrid (Fusion) (ISGS is GREEN!) onto a service road and we got out. First, these windmills are huge! From a mile or so away the look big, but up close, wow! Second, on this average-wind day, the noise was a sort of background-noise-level whoosh-whoosh. It was noticeable, but not nearly as loud as most home appliances or automobiles on a highway.

Speaking of the 707 cafe, Jill switched to morning hours this week. Clara is taking a single nap in the afternoon more often now. More friends with many more kids showed up for the fun and donut holes.

a few back items

Since I have a rare, spare moment, I'll catch up on a few items that flew by in recent weeks.

First, Janny smiles at us once in a while. It's not easy to make it happen, but here's proof.

Clara is still a riot. She is always doing something. Then it's time to sleep, and she's out like a light.
Here's a picture of Don, the cyclist riding across the country. His bike is a Jamis Aurora (I used to have one), a nice steel touring bike. Front and rear panniers and some funky metal fenders with no curvature around the tires. He travels light since he does no cooking or camping. He's quite fit for being 70.
Another school ended already. A couple of our adopt-a-students will be seniors next year!

the ballgame

After thinking about attending an Illini baseball game for some years, we finally made it out to one tonight. We thought it would be a good time, especially since the weather was so nice today. We underestimated the fun by yards. First, we were allowed to bring our dinner into the stadium (we had planned to eat under a tree nearby). Second, free entrance. Third, some 20 kids played on the grassy hill along the first base line. Clara played with groups of them the entire time she wasn't eating.

This made for a remarkably relaxing time for us. We will probably go to this season's last game tomorrow.

I think that Clara gets frustrated when she doesn't feel useful in the kitchen. She loves to help however she can. For example, stirring. Oh, and she has a set of molars as of a few weeks ago.

Janny is a sweetheart, happy baby except when hungry. Then she can be really loud.
This is not our house. Our roof does not have a giant hole in it.
Finally, our softball team got thwacked this week. Opponent score 28 runs in 4 innings. Youch! Yet another of my best hits of the year was caught.

707 cafe

Wouldn’t you know that the one night I plan to blog the system is down. Not to be denied, I am writing this up in word with the hopes of posting soon.

Jill has been full of fun ideas, perhaps due to a lack of sleep? She’s been inviting friends to come over for 707 Café, our home's cafe that is open a few hours per week. She invites friends to drink tea, eat desserts, and discuss children (or not).

The IL marathon came to town, so we walked down to mile 7 to cheer on some friends. Friends looked good at the ~ half-way point. No, we’re not interested in joining them.
I made a red brick path!
I hope you recall that our church softball team won the B league championship tournament last year. We are 3 games into our first A league season. One win, two losses. Here’s what I love about softball this year. Sometimes I hit the ball really well and make outs, and sometimes I pop up and get hits. Fun unpredictability. Did I mention that I have hit 2 home runs? I have, but I must thank the very favorable wind in each case.

We hosted a bike tourist on Wed night. Don retired in the fall, and decided to ride a bike from San Diego to his home in Dunkirk, NY. I really like his plan for the trip. He makes contact with people through warmshowers.com, the rotary club, and people he meets along the way. I imagine that riding alone all day and then camping alone at night would drive a brother nuts. This way, the former professor gets to share stories every night with someone different.

I learned a good lesson from him: when planning to meet someone in new to a city, don’t suggest a cafe that has more than one location. I suggested we meet at Espresso Royale on Goodwin. Near the corner of Pennsylvania and Lincoln, he asked several students how to get there. The first several had no idea. What? It's a 5 minute walk from there! It's the only cafe on the east side of campus! Finally, someone directed him to the undergrad library. Eventually, I did find him.