The chickens are free, and Gus went to his first Cards game!

After months and months and I don't want to know how much money spent, Kevin is finally done with the chicken coop! Here is the finished product. Sorry for the sun blaring behind it.
So now that the coop is finally done, Kevin was ready to move the chickens out into their permanent home. We decided to have a 'coop warming' party on Saturday to celebrate them moving up! But Kevin decided to move the chickens out earlier in the day instead of waiting for the party. So here is the chickens in their old home.....

And here they are in their new home.....a little confused.
And if you wondered, Kevin has named the chickens....they are General Tso, Kung Pao, and Hunan. Which one is which, I couldn't tell you.
I didn't take any pictures at the coop warming party so I don't have any to show you. Lots of people already had other plans, so it was kind of a small crowd. It was also hot outside so I'm sure a lot of people didn't want to hang out in our yard for that reason. Kevin had ordered a pony keg of Schlafly hefeweizen for the party, and some of it didn't get drank and was thrown away.....So sad! Our only other option would have been to spend more than $5 a day to keep it iced until we drank it all. Oh well. But we still had a nice time, and I think people enjoyed coming to see the chickens and the coop after all the talking about it we've done.

Monday morning, I checked my work email, and there was an email from Friday afternoon that they had leftover free tickets to Monday's Cardinals game. I quickly emailed the person and asked if there were tickets left...and low and behold, there were two. So I called Kevin to see if he was up to the challenge of taking Gus to see the Cards for the first time. And he was! Thankfully the weather was nice, and Gus still (barely) fits in the Baby Bjorn. So off we went.
Here's the best version of the family picture at Gus's first baseball game. The guy I knew that I asked to take a picture didn't exactly know how to try to get Gus to look at the camera, but oh well.
Gus was very good the whole time. Here he is contemplating the last play. And is it just me, or do i look a little Lovekamp-y in this picture? Kind of a scary angle....
The sky looked pretty so I took this picture. You can see the grass on the field is a little beat up from the previous week's Eagles/Dixie Chicks show.
Me trying to take another family picture. I hate when Gus has the Nuk in pictures, but I was too entertained by Kevin's face.
All in all, the game was a good experience. We left at the top of the 7th...Gus was getting a little fussy, but wasn't bad at all....I think we more or less left because we could. The game had been a boring one, and I think we were down 5-3 when we left, but the Cards had a good comeback in the bottom of the ninth. We missed a good one, but I think we were all glad to be home at a decent time. AND I'm going back to another game tomorrow night anyway with ALL of my sisters (and all of my brothers-in-law) but Kevin is sitting this one out. Oh well, who knew.

The empty Schlafly keg is sitting in the kitchen until Kevin returns it. Gus found it, and he likes it.
And this was Gus after my softball game yesterday....he passed out on the way home and then Kevin held him for a little while. Definitely looks like Kevin here. (And look at all that drool! His next two teeth are almost in....)
Who knows what the next post will be about? Gus's first birthday? Or Jessica's bridal shower? Or Gus playing with his cousin John? There's a lot going on in the next few days....

Video, finally

So for the last two weeks I've been trying to upload a video of Gus laughing where you can check out his teeth really well. I even made a wordpress blog to see if I could upload it to there (it seems uploading video to wordpress doesn't work unless you pay money?). Anyway, I finally just got a youtube account, and so here's a link to the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3qE6BdmVJQ
I know smarter people have youtube videos within their blog posts, but I'm not that smart. So deal with it. I guess if I can't post a video in the future, I'll do the same thing.

A relatively successful trip....

This past weekend Kevin and I took a kind of vacation. We were going to head up to the suburbs to reunite with my college roomies, and I convinced Kevin to take two extra days off to go up and spend a night in Chicago. Kevin said that was fine, as long as I booked a good hotel room. Well, I decided to use Priceline because my sister has had luck with that in Chicago. Anyway, I was less lucky, but I'll get to that.
Thursday morning we were on our way. We had plans to stop in Bloomington-Normal to have lunch with my friend Laura and her family and to see her new house. It was a perfect lunch, and Gus got a chance to eat and play and be out of his carseat for a bit. Then we were on our way to the city, hoping to get there before rush hour. Unfortunately, we hit either an accident or construction (we never figured it out) and it took us an hour to go 2 miles at one point, which meant we hit the city right at 4pm. Nightmare. Anyway, we eventually made it to our hotel and got checked in.
Our hotel was in a nice neighborhood, called the Gold Coast. As fate would have it, it was a block away from where my cousin Amy lived for 5 years until a month ago....figures. It was a neat old building (built in 1926) but left much to be desired. Just pretty shabby overall. The added touch was that as soon as we checked in, I went to the bathroom and the toilet didn't flush. Awesome.
Regardless of our hotel and getting there a little late, we continued on with our (my) plans for the evening. We took the train downtown to Millenium Park. I love this place but Kevin was unimpressed.
Here's our only family photo from the trip.
Kevin being unimpressed by the bean
Regardless, I still love the bean! My favorite piece of public art, perhaps....
So we walked through Millenium Park, and discovered a walkway to the new Modern Wing at the Art Institute - my other planned stop for the evening.
We lucked out because the Art Institute is free after 5pm on Thursdays. So that was nice because it saved us $36, but it was crazy busy as you might expect. So we just saw a few things there and checked out the new building before we headed on to dinner. Here's Gus and his classic smile along with Dad at the Art Institute.
Waiting for the train to go to dinner

So, I love pizza. And I love Chicago style pizza. So I asked my friend Shannon for a recommendation, and her favorite was Gino's East. So that's where we headed for dinner. When we got close, we realized there was a giant line.....I had no idea this place was such an institution. Gus was starving, so while we waited in line I gave him a banana and made a giant mess. We finally got a table and ordered, and then Gus had a dirty diaper, which of course was on his clothes. So he got his clothes changed. Then I gave him his dinner, which he promptly threw up everywhere. It was a fun time. Despite all this drama, the pizza was AWESOME. We enjoyed it with a pitcher of Goose Island 312, so life was good. So back to the hotel we went.

This is Gus trying to bite my face at Gino's East....it's his new favorite thing to do.
Friday morning, we woke up and went to breakfast at a little cafe in Amy's old building. Good food! Then it was my plan to walk around the Gold Coast area to see some of the cool old houses, and then up through Lincoln Park and the zoo and maybe along the shore of the lake a bit. Kevin said he didn't really want to walk anywhere, and I said Gus and I would go by ourselves. So we meandered through the park. Half of the zoo was closed for construction and I wasn't overly impressed with what I did see, but hey, it was free. Then I went to the Conservatory which was pretty cool considering I like plants and all. Here is Gus and the conservatory:

This was right inside the main door of the conservatory - very nice!

After Gus and I walked, we went back and checked out of the hotel. Then we drove a few miles north to see my friend Shannon's relatively new condo - very nice place! After that, we went with Shannon to the Goose Island Clyborne Pub, basically the Goose Island equivalent of the Tap Room. Shannon and I both chose to try flights of beers, while Kevin got a 'Hefe-Hawks-win' - the name of their hefeweizen which was named in a contest. The beer was good, the food was good, everything was good.
Here is my flight. Yum!
After Goose Island, we decided to get the hell out of dodge. It was nearly 2 and we thought we'd beat the traffic. WRONG! It took us about an hour and a half to drive the 20 miles to Downers Grove where Katrina and Brad live. CRAZY!!!!
Unfortunately not all of my pictures have uploaded from my camera to my computer yet (we have this wireless photo card but for some reason only some uploaded and I'm too lazy to manually do it right now) but here is a picture of Gus playing with the truck Erikka gave him for his first birthday - it's his first birthday present ever!
But after we got to Katrina's Friday, we waited for Anna and Erikka to arrive and then we ordered pizza and sat around. Saturday we went to the Downer's Grove farmers market, and then it was Katrina's shower. It was by far the fanciest shower I've ever been to - at a restaurant with a 3 course meal! Hopefully one of the other girls will send me the picture of us all dressed up at the shower..... Kevin and Brad went to a microbrewery and drank for the 4 hours we were at the shower, and then that evening we grilled brats for dinner and sat around some more. Sunday we headed home after we got everything together in the morning - Kevin wanted to get some work done at home. But the chicken coop is finally almost done - it better be done in time for the chickens to be released at the coop warming party saturday!
So all in all, it was a good trip. I don't believe I'm ever going back to Chicago with Kevin again, so if anyone else wants to go, let me know ;) Gus was soooo good, and so flexible to having a modified schedule every day based on what we were doing. I'm so lucky to have such a good little boy!

Mmmm beer, followed by laughs and toofers

Kevin and I went to the St. Louis Brewers Heritage Beer Festival on Friday. Kevin was actually the one that wanted to go, and typically if he wants to go anywhere I try to go along with it. There were 14 local breweries and more than 60 types of beer! So here we are ready to try it all.

They had a HUGE tent, and just one really long row of tables, and the beers were arranged by style. I was disappointed, because I would have preferred to try all the beers from each brewery at a time.....but oh well. Here you can kind of see how long the tent was. Crazy big!
All in all, I think we tried about half of the beers, and found a few we really liked!

While mom and dad drank beer all night, Gus spent his first night at Aunt Jackie and Uncle Allen's. I guess he was good. Jackie was tickled that the only poopy diaper was while she was gone, so Allen changed it. Haha. After picking Gus up on Saturday, we headed to mom's for the afternoon, and eventually went to the Schweizerfest parade. Unfortunately it started raining when the parade was supposed to start, so I had to entertain Gus in the car for awhile while we waited. Not fun. But here he is playing with the steering wheel.


Eventually the parade did start, but it wasn't long before it started raining again. So we stood in the rain for awhile, but we gave up before most of the floats even came by. Oh well, we tried.

I had a video that currently won't upload....so I'll try again later.

BALL!

Gus has been obsessed with his Illini basketball recently. I also think he tries to say 'ball' (apparently he also tries to say 'bubbles' at day care, where they play with bubbles a lot). But he loves to bounce it and chase after it. Here he's even wearing an Illinois outfit and playing with his ball.
Gus also loves to stand up and look out the front door. Here, he and both dogs are checking things out. You can see I quit trying to snap this 12 month size outfit that doesn't fit him....

Gus also loves pulling on Lucy's tail. It's hilarious because she's jumpy, so as soon as he pulls on it, she jumps up and runs off, making Gus laugh.....then Gus usually follows her to get at least one more tail pull out of it before he starts doing something else.

I haven't taken pictures of Gus and Kevin lately, so I thought I would. Gus was being PERFECT but Kevin wasn't cooperating. The one picture I finally got with Kevin looking and his eyes open, Gus wasn't as cute. But look at this kid!

He recently had his messiest lunch ever. I think he was rebelling because I was giving him baby food I was trying to get rid of, and he's more used to regular food now. So he kept grabbing the spoon and smearing the food all over. I think this was the first time I had to give him a bath after he ate because he was that dirty.... He's also generally been making this face lately. Maybe he just discovered his lips?

Sunday my friend Lindzy came over with her son Joey. Joey is 9 months old, but I'm pretty sure he'll be walking before Gus. He also has a crazy lot of hair! But they enjoyed tearing my kitchen apart.

And, as promised, here are the ugly chicklings.

And here's a movie of Gus playing with his ball.

Gus is a jabbermouth

I had been wanting to make a movie of Gus being talkative, but he always stops when I get the camera out. So here he was talking and playing and then went on to play with Satchel, so it's a little long. But cute, of course, cute.

And then there were three.....

I'm very sad to tell you that one of the chickens passed away this weekend. Kevin has no idea what happened.....but he was downstairs and he heard this awful noise, and when he walked over to the box they are in, one just keeled over. So now we're down to three. I keep meaning to take a picture of them with my camera but then I forget. But right now they are pretty ugly - kind of in an awkward teenage stage I guess. Sometime I'll remember a picture though.
Kevin worked very hard this weekend to get the chicken coop finished. Finally by Monday evening he was ready to move it to its permanent home (and I finally could have my patio back!!!). So his brother came over, and Travis, who was in town visiting Agnes, also offered to help. However, the three of them were still having a hard time moving it. So the neighbor came over and helped too. It was a pretty comical process, but I didn't think to get my camera til they were almost done. So here they are, nearly to the final resting place against the fence. We're planning to have a 'coop warming party' in a couple of weeks when the chickens move outside. Should be a good time.
Other than Kevin working really hard on stuff at home, we were otherwise busy as well, but I forgot to take any pictures. We had grandma's birthday party and fish fry, and another day Gus and I went to Lafayette Square Park with Lauren, Erin, and Max for a walk. We spent Monday at home except for a trip to Tower Grove Park with Old Man Satchel, who managed to walk for about 20 minutes (although then he needed me to lift him back into and out of the car....).

I have a few pictures from the previous weekend though. Gus and I went to the Botanical Gardens for awhile and I took a few good pictures of this cute kid.



Then this picture is from grandma's house - Gus was looking outside at all the cats and dogs. He's in his diaper because it was about 90 degrees outside and mom and dad hadn't yet turned on their AC. HOT!
Coming soon, hopefully....a video of Gus the jabbermouth. He talks SO LOUD and SO MUCH! But it seems usually by the time I get the video camera out and he sees it, he shuts up. So that gives you something to look forward to.....