Fall Fun, Part I

Lately I've been itching to get out of the city and do some fall camping or hiking. Since we don't have any plans in the works I've been trying to find ways to get my nature fix without leaving town. Last weekend we went up to the North Park Village Nature Center at Pulaski and Peterson. It was our first time there, and I was pretty impressed. It's a forty-six acre nature preserve that includes four different habitats: a woodland, a wetland, a prairie, and an oak savanna. (As an interesting footnote, the area used to house the city's tuberculosis sanitarium until 1974 when, owing to medical advances, there was no longer a need for one.)

Tate had a great time; he has started pointing and reaching for things now, and he wanted to touch and see everything. It was so exciting to see him so interested in nature (although he also wants to touch everything on the CTA bus, so maybe his interest wasn't in nature per se). We saw geese, a doe and her fawn, about a bazillion bees (the yellow flowers in the picture are just covered with them), and Tate's personal favorite, squirrels. We saw a handful of families with older kids, and I was thinking of how much Tate will enjoy coming there when he can walk on the trails on his own. The trails are a lot shorter than they look on the map, so it's a perfect hike for little legs. Since major roads surround the preserve you can still hear traffic and sirens so it wasn't quite as remote as we'd hoped, but it was still exciting to find a place like that in the city.

If I ever see my life flash before my eyes...

...I'll be super glad to finally know what happened to all of my lost stuff.

Today I spent the better part of an hour retracing our steps to try to find one of Tate's shoes. Tate hates shoes and socks, but I felt like I had to put them on since when I don't strangers like to tell me that he's going to be too cold (which is exactly what happened after he lost the first one and I took the other one off so we wouldn't lose it too). It was one of his cute little baseball Robeez that I bought on eBay last spring since I was no way going to pay full price for Robeez. I came home a shoe short and so grouchy Brad even went out later and looked for it, but no luck. What happened to it? Did some other kid grab it? A strong wind blew it into a sewer? Is someone's dog in bed happily gnawing on it right now? Just another of life's mysteries, I guess.

(illustration via julianmizuki.blogspot.com)

Bad mommy

By now most of you have probably heard about this lawsuit in which some rich kids tried to sue their mom for emotional distress for things like failing to send college care packages, trying to make her son wear a seatbelt, and asking her daughter to come home at midnight from a homecoming celebration. (That daughter should have lived in my house; my curfew was midnight and my parents would set a radio alarm clock with the volume turned up all the way in our living room for just after midnight. If I wasn’t home to turn it off the parents would be awake and very, very mad. If I had been smart I would have come home, turned it off, and then gone back out...but I wasn’t.) Anyway, this got me thinking of all of the things Tater could possibly try to sue us for down the road. It’s not a short list.

-Failing to recognize that he had jaundice when he was born even though he was orange as a pumpkin (we thought he was just tan).
-Bringing him home from the hospital on a germy CTA bus.
-Dropping the home phone (Brad) and cell phone (me) on his head when he was a couple months old.
-Letting him nap in his bouncer for the first 6 months since we couldn’t get him to nap in his crib.
-Failing to read the sleep/baby books ahead of time so that we’d know how to get him to nap in his crib.
-Getting him an Easter basket filled with candy we like rather than something he could actually enjoy.
-Not feeding him much in the way of finger foods until close to his first birthday since we thought he shouldn’t have them since he didn’t have teeth and would choke. (Turns out babies don’t need teeth to eat. See above: failure to read baby books.)
-Letting his 3-year-old cousin Tondi tongue kiss him (and taking a photo of it).
-Me lying to a superskinny salesperson that I didn’t know what size dress I needed since I’d “just had a baby” even though Tate was a year old (and not with me at the time, which is why I got away with it).
-Failing to make homemade cupcakes for his first birthday even though I said I would.

I’m sure there is more. I’m really glad the “bad mommy” lawsuit was thrown out. I don't need that kind of precedent hanging over my head.