Faraway friends come to Indiana!
Because this is exactly the kind of stuff that LJ (being, you know, a journal) is useful for recording:
I should start by noting that my friend Andy G (whom some of you remember from Brandeis) was visiting Chicago for a week around Memorial Day, and asked if he could come out and spend a day with us. He was staying most of the week with a friend way up in the north suburbs, but took the commuter train out here (about 25 minutes from our house, and just over an hour's ride from downtown) on Sunday morning. Aria and I picked him up and we all went to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Baby's first beach day! Then we came back toward our house, and went out for deep-dish pizza -- along with another mutual Brandeis friend, Dara, who was my hallmate one year and is now a radiologist and turns out to have started a locum tenens position right here in Crown Point (at the hospital where Aria was born), so she'll be here every other week for at least the next few months. Looking forward to hanging out with her again while she's here.
Then, last weekend, ablock came to see us! He was planning a trip to Chicago for NANOG June 12-15, and on realizing that we're just an hour away, he asked if he should come out a day early in order to visit us. "YES!!!" I said. So he flew into Midway Airport on Saturday morning, and I drove there (right around an hour from us) and picked him up. After the requisite Dunkin' Donuts stop for Coffee Coolattas, we picked up a(nother deep-dish) pizza for lunch, and came back and hung out around the kitchen table for the afternoon, then around the patio for the evening while etrace grilled steaks for dinner. Which meant I skipped the erev-Shavuot learning session I would otherwise have tried to go to at the shul... but, well, at least we had ceremonial cheesecake baked by nephew J.
Due to the 98-degree heat wave and the fact that we have only two window a/c units, we took Aria into our room so that Unca Pup could sleep on the floor in Aria's room instead of sweltering in the music studio. This sounded like a fine idea at the time -- we'll just put her down in the playpen/porta-crib that's in our room anyway! -- except for the part where she HATES the porta-crib and screams the minute you try to transfer her down into it. So, she wouldn't go to sleep, and wouldn't stay asleep, and I let her come downstairs with us while we ate cheesecake, and then I ended up trying to keep her in the bed with us all night, which meant I didn't sleep more than 20 minutes at a time the entire night. UGH. It gave me a new appreciation for how well she sleeps in her own crib normally! :-P So we gave up on sleeping by about 8am, got up, made pancakes, hung out some more, and then I drove Pup to the 1:38pm commuter rail.
And yesterday, we drove 2 hours south to Indianapolis to meet up with jesse_in_boston and jedilora (plus her dad) and 3-year-old R, who had driven out from Boston for the SCA 50th Anniversary event June 18-25. We met for pancakes (at the delightfully named Hotcakes Emporium Pancake House Restaurant) and it was SUCH a pleasure to see them.
Plus, etrace has other good friends in Indianapolis that we never see, and it turned out they were going to be free yesterday afternoon/evening, so we went to see them afterwards. After a brief interim stop at the Holliday Park playground (Aria's first real baby-swing experience, though the slides were too hot to try out), we hung out at their lovely house, where Aria spent fully two hours toddling around nonstop (until she fell over for a 20-minute nap). Then we all went up to the nearby Broad Ripple neighborhood, walked a little bit of the Monon Rail Trail and through the Indianapolis Art Center sculpture grounds, and ended up at La Piedad for casual Mexican dinner. A long but really nice day.
In unrelated news, today is etrace's first Father's Day, yay! We're going out for prime rib in a couple hours -- an early dinner -- and invited my dad to come join us. Right now, baby is napping (making up for yesterday) and now that I've gotten all this out, I'm going to lie down for a few minutes too. <3
N.B.: Cross-posted from Dreamwidth; click to view or comment on original post.
I should start by noting that my friend Andy G (whom some of you remember from Brandeis) was visiting Chicago for a week around Memorial Day, and asked if he could come out and spend a day with us. He was staying most of the week with a friend way up in the north suburbs, but took the commuter train out here (about 25 minutes from our house, and just over an hour's ride from downtown) on Sunday morning. Aria and I picked him up and we all went to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Baby's first beach day! Then we came back toward our house, and went out for deep-dish pizza -- along with another mutual Brandeis friend, Dara, who was my hallmate one year and is now a radiologist and turns out to have started a locum tenens position right here in Crown Point (at the hospital where Aria was born), so she'll be here every other week for at least the next few months. Looking forward to hanging out with her again while she's here.
Then, last weekend, ablock came to see us! He was planning a trip to Chicago for NANOG June 12-15, and on realizing that we're just an hour away, he asked if he should come out a day early in order to visit us. "YES!!!" I said. So he flew into Midway Airport on Saturday morning, and I drove there (right around an hour from us) and picked him up. After the requisite Dunkin' Donuts stop for Coffee Coolattas, we picked up a(nother deep-dish) pizza for lunch, and came back and hung out around the kitchen table for the afternoon, then around the patio for the evening while etrace grilled steaks for dinner. Which meant I skipped the erev-Shavuot learning session I would otherwise have tried to go to at the shul... but, well, at least we had ceremonial cheesecake baked by nephew J.
Due to the 98-degree heat wave and the fact that we have only two window a/c units, we took Aria into our room so that Unca Pup could sleep on the floor in Aria's room instead of sweltering in the music studio. This sounded like a fine idea at the time -- we'll just put her down in the playpen/porta-crib that's in our room anyway! -- except for the part where she HATES the porta-crib and screams the minute you try to transfer her down into it. So, she wouldn't go to sleep, and wouldn't stay asleep, and I let her come downstairs with us while we ate cheesecake, and then I ended up trying to keep her in the bed with us all night, which meant I didn't sleep more than 20 minutes at a time the entire night. UGH. It gave me a new appreciation for how well she sleeps in her own crib normally! :-P So we gave up on sleeping by about 8am, got up, made pancakes, hung out some more, and then I drove Pup to the 1:38pm commuter rail.
And yesterday, we drove 2 hours south to Indianapolis to meet up with jesse_in_boston and jedilora (plus her dad) and 3-year-old R, who had driven out from Boston for the SCA 50th Anniversary event June 18-25. We met for pancakes (at the delightfully named Hotcakes Emporium Pancake House Restaurant) and it was SUCH a pleasure to see them.
Plus, etrace has other good friends in Indianapolis that we never see, and it turned out they were going to be free yesterday afternoon/evening, so we went to see them afterwards. After a brief interim stop at the Holliday Park playground (Aria's first real baby-swing experience, though the slides were too hot to try out), we hung out at their lovely house, where Aria spent fully two hours toddling around nonstop (until she fell over for a 20-minute nap). Then we all went up to the nearby Broad Ripple neighborhood, walked a little bit of the Monon Rail Trail and through the Indianapolis Art Center sculpture grounds, and ended up at La Piedad for casual Mexican dinner. A long but really nice day.
In unrelated news, today is etrace's first Father's Day, yay! We're going out for prime rib in a couple hours -- an early dinner -- and invited my dad to come join us. Right now, baby is napping (making up for yesterday) and now that I've gotten all this out, I'm going to lie down for a few minutes too. <3
N.B.: Cross-posted from Dreamwidth; click to view or comment on original post.