Sunday, February 24, 2008

Hello August Gerwig


Everybody welcome to the world our first nephew, and Bella's newest cousin, August Gerwig!

We can't wait to meet him!

Monday, February 18, 2008

Scott is the Biggest Loser

I know, I know, this is something alot of you have been saying since, oh, 1989 or so. The rest of you are saying it enough now to catch up I'm sure. But that is beside the point.

As you loyal readers of my wife's blog have read, she has started a diet to lose a little bit of weight that we've both put on in the past year. But don't worry folks, she's not doing it all alone, her hubby is along for the ride as well.

Believe it or not, I was the first to start our new diet around the beginning of the year. I made one of my all too rare trips to the gym at work, and stepped on a scale for the first time in a long time. I was pretty shocked to see that I weighed more than I did when I went on a major diet around 5 years ago or so, so I knew it was time for me to do something about it again.

Now I already know what you are saying, you're saying "Why mess with perfection?" Well, believe it or not, I was actually around 40 pounds over where I would ideally like to be, and if you believe those government guidelines, I was around 50 pounds overweight. Yes, these are the same standards that say I am OBESE, but Michael Jordan also was considered obese in his prime according to those standards. Go figure.

But as I said, I started the diet around the start of the year. I'm basically just trying to stick to a low fat diet, as in my goal is to eat less than 10 grams of fat every day. It's actually not the hardest diet in the world to follow, it just takes some alterations to what I'd usually eat. Must be working, believe it or not, I've already lost around 15 pounds since the start of the year!

I'm pretty much doing this to avoid any future heart problems I could inherit from my family, and so that Bella has a Daddy to nearly give heartattacks to 15 or 16 years from now when she starts dating boys. I think I even just had a mini-tremor typing that out. But wish me luck, I'm almost halfway to my goal, so we've got a few months to make it through still.

And just to prove to you all how serious I am, I've actually eaten salads. Yes, I, Mookiedaddy, have been eating salads. I will leave you with that shocking thought.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Happy Valentine's Day!



Bella hopes you all had a great Valentine's Day! She even wants to share one of her flowers with you!









Wednesday, February 13, 2008

We Don't Know Where She Gets This From

So while we were shopping at Target this weekend, we just happened to find a shirt in Bella's department that has a drawing of the Eiffel Tower on it. As you may have read on Michele's blog, we have a map of the Paris train system hanging on our wall, and one of Bella's latest tricks is that she can point out some of the major landmarks in Paris.

They have bubbles on the map for the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triumph, etc., and if you ask Bella to point one of them, chances are pretty good that she'll get it right.

But back to the new shirt, we of course had to pick up the shirt, especially since it was on clearance. We put it on her today, and asked her what was on the shirt, and right away she said "Tower!"

It's pretty scary how smart this kid is. She then decided to mess around with her stacking bowls while we were watching tv downstairs, and she then decided that she needed to crawl up into my sweater. Good times.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Our Adventure in Richpeopleland





Last Thursday, we got to live the high life by heading down to McCormick Place for the First Look for Charity for the Chicago Auto Show.

Since this was a big charity event, we had to get all dressed up, including a tux for me and a new dress for Michele. While Bella stayed at home to hang out with Grandma, we braved the traffic and fought our way to the show.

After sitting in traffic for 2 hours (yes, two hours), we finally arrived. As you can probably guess, Michele and I are not exactly car fanatics, we were mostly going for the fun of it and to see what kind of food and drinks they'd have. Plus there was a chance we could have won one of three cars, that was enough reason to go.

We did actually look at some cars while we were there though, since this may be the year my car finally kicks the bucket. We've had 11 great years together, so I got my money's worth from it at least. All I know that I want is a hybrid of some sort, so we spent most of our time searching out the limited selection of them.

The food selection was pretty fantastic though. We found plenty of great options the more we walked. We found some simple pastas and chicken and beef early on. As we moved on, we found a couple of tables with rack of lamb, baked brie cheese, sushi, and loads of other stuff. Of course we ended up spending loads of time near those tables. Still not sure which car manufacturer they were near, so you see where our priorities were.

Since the tickets were pretty pricey (thanks to my wife's company giving them away in a raffle), we were able to see and sit in some exotic cars we'd usually never even be allowed to touch, without the usual mob of thousands of people that would normally swarm around the same cars on the normal show days. Michele took her first opportunity to sit in one of the Jaguar models. Which one, you ask? No idea, the expensive one, that's my answer.

I decided to do the same as well, while we were at the BMW section, I decided to have a seat in a model that costs a mere $100,000. Don't worry, they immediately scrubbed the car down after a lowly person like myself exited it.

We then walked around more just to see what was there, and of course to see what other food and drinks we could easily find. As you could probably expect, the BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, etc. areas were all swarmed with people. We decided to wander over to the Kia area for the heck of it, and we were literally the only people there. That was almost entirely the case when we went over to the GM area of the hall. Oh well.

While we were at the GM area, I did have to take a seat in my future mid-life crisis wheels, aka a Chevy Corvette. Aside from feeling like my ass was actually an inch off of the ground, it was well worth it.

After packing our guts with so much rack of lamb, we were nearly splitting at the seams, we decided to call it a night and head home. If we ever win tickets to the opening night again, we'll be there in a heartbeat, mainly to pocket as much rack of lamb and baked brie to enjoy for the next few days afterwards. Guess we should have brought some baggies with us, oh well.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Bella's next career





In case the whole guitar playing thing doesn't work out for her, Bella is now learning the drums as well thanks to our Rock Band game.

Almost every day when she comes home from daycare, Bella now yells "drums!" and runs over to them to start playing them. I think we could probably fit a full size drum kit in her future bedroom... Hmmm....

Bella's other favorite activity of the moment is to play with the Thomas train set that Grandpa and Grandma G got her for christmas. She'll pretty much spend a good solid 15 minutes just driving the trains around the wooden track. It's somehow even distracted her from watching Sesame Street and Teletubies. Very impressive stuff.














Our big even this week will be our attendance at the ritzy first look for charity at the Chicago Auto Show. We won tickets through Michele's work, I get to wear a tux (haven't done that since we got hitched!), and Michele gets to get all decked out in a dress too. We'll be hobnobbing with Chicago's elite and rich folk, so we'll be just slightly out of place there as you can guess. At least we won't be forced to look at the cars with all those "ordinary" people out there. We'll let you know how it turned it once we recover from our caviar and champagne hangover on Friday...

In the meantime, here's another video treat for you, here's Bella's performance of Weezer's "Say It Ain't So" on the drums.