I Don't Get It

I'm still not sure why Ryan wants to get a fake tree for Christmas next year. What could be better than picking out a tree, the fresh Christmas-y smell when you get home from work and throwing out the tree year-after-year over our balcony?

Maybe, maybe it is the thousands of needles that we could hear falling from the tree on a daily basis, or the amount of needles that we are continuing to find around our house.

No matter how our tree ends up (see example), I still love getting a live tree every year. Maybe next year we'll try buying one from a tree farm rather than a parking lot.

Quite Possibly the Best Gift Ever

When opening gifts on Christmas day in Jacksonville, Ryan and I were surprised to open a deck of cards and even more surprised at the excited look on my mom's face. Then as we read what was inside, we were nothing less than delighted. 

In this deck is 52 cards representing 52 restaurants in Chicago - categorized by cuisine and neighborhood - that are a $10 giftcard that can be used on food at that particular restaurant.  We were thrilled to see some of our favorite restaurants - Sola, Deleece and Spacca Nopali, but even more excited to see a ton of restaurants we wanted to try and had never even heard of. 

Last Saturday, we chose from the deck and came up with Mixteco Grill in Andersonville. It was delicious! A quaint, BYOB Mexican restaurant that was bursting at the seams with people. The food was AMAZING and we will definitely be returning - all because of this little deck of cards.  We expecially loved that we could enjoy our cans of Miller Light that we had brought in a brown lunch bag.  

The ticket we got on our car afterwards was not amazing though, so we will be spending this weekend battling the City of Chicago. Oh snow and negative 35 degree temperatures, when will you go away?

Merry Merry!

As I downloaded my photos from Christmas in Jacksonville, I noticed 95% of them were of Mya ;) How can I not take that many pictures when she is this cute! Our hearts melted each time she yelled "Auntie", or tried out "Mabolls" (Marbles) and "Uncle". And we all laughed every time she said "Cockle-doodle-do" and "Up! Up!".

Now we just have to figure out to post her Christmas card with her on Santa's lap.

Simon Family Christmas

Our Christmas celebration came early this year with the Simons. With -25 degree temps outside, it was nice to be able to sit by their Christmas tree and eat some delicious Chili's. If only we could celebrate every year with Chili's.

While there, we got to open gifts, put together puzzles and watch the boys tumble around. It is pretty unbelievable that Ethan and Lucas are walking and are already toddlers! And we still get to giggle at the different things that Emily says like "Accidents happen" and " I get to crawl into my mommy and daddy's bed because there are monsters in my room."

We got to open our gifts from the McDaniels as well and we got our NEW LIGHT! Yeah! Can't wait to see Ryan put it up in our dining room! Oh, and of course, to have it displayed will be nice as well.

Da Bulls

Here we are at our third annual Bulls game. This year we had the best seats yet - we weren't in the last row of seats, nor did we have any unruly fans to deal with. Bulls won against the Jazz 106 to 98. It was of course, good to see Deron Williams as well.

Afterwards, we enjoyed one of our Chicago favorites - Ed and Jean's where we took too many Apple Pie shots. Delicious! But, this could be why I had to take a 3 hour nap today. Woops!

Now we're off to enjoy this wonderful -25 degree weather!

Christmas Vacation

Now all we have to do is wrap the mountain of gifts that is in our guestroom. I wish we would have had a camera as Ryan and I walked home with our tree today through the snow. We found it a little more difficult to get a tree home now that we don't have an SUV. Luckily it wasn't too cold. Again, Ryan did a great job negotiating the price of our tree!

Yes He Did

Laura and I were lucky enough to participate in some history last night. This giant video screen was as close as we got to President-Elect Obama at the Grant Park rally, but just being there with the crowd of 65,000 was exciting enough. Here's how I described it to my parents:

It was really great. The atmosphere at Grant Park kind of reminded me of Wrigley Field this summer when there was a sense of inevitability that things would go our way...fortunately Barack performed in the clutch a little better than the Cubs! It was great to see the mix of attendees at the rally - young, old, white, black, you name it. It was amazing how many people showed up, and everyone was in a good mood and very respectful of Mccain's concession speech, so that was nice. Speaking of which, I'm glad that McCain no longer has to pander to the crazy folks and can get back to being the sensible guy that he's always been. I really do admire him and either with a spot in the cabinet, or as a leader in the Senate, I'm sure him and Barack will be able to work together. CTA ran very smoothly (as did the whole operation) considering the massive amounts of people they were moving around, Daley had all hands on deck as I'm sure he wanted to prove that we're ready for the Olympics. It was surreal to see Michigan Avenue swamped with people after the rally, chanting Yes We Can!

As for Barack, John Kass had a great column today about how far we've come - It wasn't too long ago that MLK, on a visit to Chicago, was hit in the head with a brick and experienced some pretty violent racism. 40 years may seem like a long time to us, but in the context of history it really isn't. It really is inspiring that we live in a country that can not only evolve enough to elect a black man as president, but can evolve quickly enough in 8 years to realize that George W. had this country on a terrible path and we needed to send a message that we were fed up with it.

Here's what the crowd looked like right before they announced that Obama had clinched it. I'm looking forward to showing this post to our grandkids when they're old enough to understand.