Good night, you princes of Elmhurst, you kings of Illinois.

Our boys are home.

xo

6-cousin pile-up

We hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving. We're particularly thankful for our cousins.

Being your own landscaper has its perks

Good stylists are hard to come by. So what?

Weather, budget, and gender worked against us, but Pink rocked it out on Halloween!

Thirty days HAD September and only a single post to show for it?

We haven't been very good about updating the blog this month, that's true. But it was a beautiful September just the same. Here's a glimpse of some of the fun that we managed to capture on camera.

We are now proud members of the Morton Arboretum. Our timing was perfect. If September was any indication, it's going to be a gorgeous autumn.





More trips to the zoo!


Alejandro is taking soccer! He's speedy and enthusiastic...and more or less incapable of staying focused. But he sure looks adorable in that uniform.


We went back to Millennium Park with Libby and Emma to enjoy a perfect day of fun in the sun.




We went down to the 57th Street Children's Book Fair. If you get a chance to go, go! The parade, that passes in the blink of an eye, is crazy charming and perfectly accessible for little kids.





Mooma came down for a lovely visit including a long-overdue family dinner.




We celebrated the marriage of cousin Cathy and Paul who tied the knot and rocked the house! Congratulations!! (Special thanks to Julia for tirelessly--and I mean tirelessly-- entertaining Alejandro.)






While many of our friends set off for school, we've been goofing off a lot.


And we've been learning a lot about rhyming, our bodies (he's obsessed with blood, lungs, and bones!), and knock-knock jokes. Knock-knock jokes never get old. N-E-V-E-R! Here's a pretty standard example of what we hear a couple dozen times a day.

Hurry back!

Watching Alejandro play with Sydney and Carter, his friends from Michigan, makes my heart sing. I've known Nikki and Bruce since college--more years than I care to count! We've witnessed a lot of each other's lives and now we're watching our kids become friends. More specifically, we're watching Alejandro fall head over heels for Sydney. (You may have noticed a pattern here: Alejandro loves older women. Who am I kidding? He loves younger women, too. He pals around with the boys, but this budding Casanova...I mean, feminist(!!)...definitely values the girls.)

Wordsmith

Alejandro invented a new word. We're a little fuzzy on its spelling, but phonetically it reads like this: egglunicious

Egglunicious. When you ask Alejandro what it means, he says, "It means when you're smiling and happy and have gummy letters." When I suggested that we write a poem about it, he grabbed the pen out of my hand and wrote E G L N C, then turned to me with concern and said, "There's an E in there somewhere." While I haven't figured out exactly where that other E goes, I'm still quite impressed. We'll let Webster handle the spelling.

Hope you're feeling very egglunicious today!