It's A Beautiful Day For Baseball So Let's Play Two!

This week we decided to head down to Chicago for a pair of Cubs games at the Friendly Confines. We loaded up the SUV with Janna, Stuart and my Mother and took off for the Windy City.
On Thursday Janna and I went to Wrigley to see the Cubs play the Cincinnati Reds. We sat in the bleachers, which is always quite interesting. We see above our loser pitcher Ted Lilly warming up before the game.
The Bleachers are always interesting out at Wrigley. One has to arrive well before gates open so that a good seat can be secured. We stood behind a group of 20 somethings with their high school friends. This group befriended a homeless man named Mississippi Mike, they gave him beer, cigarettes and money. But that's not the best part, one of these kids told him he should get a job out in the suburbs. Why he knew of a good place where he could operate heavy machinery, make good money and even get good insurance benefits, even dental coverage. Our homeless friends said he couldn't be hired because he has a felony on his record, big surprise eh? Leave it to a bunch of drunk kids to tell a homeless man to get a job with good insurance benefits.
This is the view of Chicago from our room at Hotel 71. Quite a view eh? The Cubs lost the game so we drowned our sorrows away in Italian food at Osteria Via Stato. The food was excellent, especially my chocolate creme brulee. I highly recommend the Italian dinner feast, which is very reasonable in price.
Friday we headed out to Wrigleyville again, this time the whole group came. He had lunch at a place out by the ballpark called Goose Island, another recommended place. I had their Stilton burger, which I will try to replicate at home over and over again.
Nothing says exciting like taking a boy to a baseball game, though in this shot Stuart looks half asleep. I can assure you, he hardly slept at all. Stuart's very interested in looking at all the people and making new friends.
As you can see we had pretty good seats for Friday's game against Pittsburgh. A few more random shots from the game:

What father wouldn't be excited about taking his son to a baseball game? Friday was Stuart's third game. You will recall that he went to a Cubs game last year when he was five weeks old and a Tigers game at three months. He'll be attending a couple of Tiger games this year, including the day before his birthday when the Tigers play that other team that wears pinstripes.
After the game on Friday we went to one of our favorite Chicago French restaurants, Brassarie Jo. The food was excellent as always. Stuart behaved himself perfectly once again, as he did throughout the entire weekend. Being 11 months old we were worried that he might have a meltdown at some point, which would be understandable considering that he was completely off schedule. As it turns out he rarely cried at all and the worst of it was reserved for the 2-3 minutes before he fell asleep each night in his play pen. In other words, he behaved himself beyond all reasonable expectation and his parents were well pleased and his grandmother was highly impressed. We were greatly blessed by the Lord this weekend.

Timber!

We woke up at 3:30 Wednesday morning to a loud thud. It sounded as though someone was trying to break into the house, although I later opined that such a criminal would have to be a complete idiot. After all, wouldn't a criminal want to make a little less noise? In any event, we discovered that a branch from our neighbors tree had fallen into our yard. As you can see, the branch is as big as a tree.
This is the tree that the branch fell off of. How our neighbor is going to remove the tree itself is beyond me. We were pleased that my in-laws knew someone who cut down our branch and hauled it away for free. Apparently they have some sort of wood burning furnace or something, in any event they seemed pleased with the free wood.
As you can see, the branch extends well into our neighbors yard. Seamus and Deirbhile were of course very interested. We're certainly thankful that the branch didn't fall down during the day. One of the dogs could have been killed or worse our neighbors could have been working in their back yard and been killed. God has blessed us here indeed.

What A Mess

Friday we got to go to our first Tigers game of the year. As you can see, Janna is all decked out in her Tigers outfit.
It was 40 degrees when the game started and warmed up to a balmy 41. The Tigers played like garbage and we have Jason Grilli to thank for the loss. I'm the first on the fire Jim Leyland bandwagon, he's done a terrible job managing his bullpen so far this season.
While we were away Stuart and Seamus got into some trouble. As you can see, they both have a guilty look on their face and as can be expected they both deny everything.
Stuart has found it a good idea to take all of his clothes out of his dresser drawer. He grabs one piece and throws it over his shoulder, before it lands he's got his little hands on something else.
Seamus finds this all wildly amusing. He especially enjoyed playing peekaboo with Stuart. Stuart holds a piece of clothing over his face then rips it away. Normally he does this with us, in which case he gets a reaction of some sort. With Seamus, he gets a big fuzzy nose in the face. I'm not sure which Stuart likes better, I'm thinking the nose.
As you can see, the destruction is great. Clothes are everywhere, Stuart's and Seamus's never clean up their amusements it seems. Now if you'll excuse me, some clothes need to be put back in their drawer.