Happy Match Day (and birthday, Dad!)

Today is Carl's "Match Day." I'll let Carl and Kathleen spread the news of where they're headed next, but since they were busy doing match stuff today, I got the pleasure of getting Lily ready this morning and taking her to school. We've had some great conversations lately -here are some snippets.

In bed this morning...

Lily: "Where's Mommy and Daddy?"
Ingrid: "They're at Daddy's work. It's match day."
Lily: "Match day? Be back?"
Ingrid: "Yup. I'm going to take you to school and then Mommy and Daddy will pick you up."
Lily: "No. Not daddy. I told him no pick me up. Just Mommy. No daddy in the car. Mommy and Ingrid. Daddy with Terra."
Ingrid: "Well, we'll see what we can do."
Lily: "Put them on the naughty chair."

Then on the way to school...

Ingrid: "Did you know it's match day today?"
Lily: "Go to school and then match day?"
Ingrid: "Well, it's actually match day all day long."
Lily: "Hmmm."
Ingrid: "Today Mommy and Daddy find out where you're going to move to."
Lily: "Let's go right now."

Some other favorite recent Lily-isms include:

• Carl plays a game with Lily where he says a piece of food is his and nobody better touch it. Lily inevitably takes the bait and ends up eating the food and Carl yells and says, "Who ate my food?!" The other day after several rounds of this game, Lily announced with a laugh, "Daddy's a funny guy!"
• Last Friday when Carl, Ryan and I were playing Monopoly and Lily was being our "banker", Kathleen told her it was time for bed. Very seriously she stated, "You go. I'm working."

It's going to be very strange to not hear her voice all the time when they move this summer!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Saturday I spent the day in Fell's Point celebrating an early St. Patrick's Day on a bit of a pub crawl. They don't do St. Patrick's Day up quite as big in Baltimore as they do in Chicago, but it was fun all the same. (And honestly, I was really happy to not have to stand in lines to get into bars at 2 in the afternoon.) I was a little lax with taking pictures, but here are a few....

Christine decides she's not really a fan of Irish Car Bombs. (Who can blame her?)

I'm not sure if this was in response to something she drank or something just hit Beth's fancy.

It was a beautiful 60 degree + day in Baltimore. Another difference between St. Pats in Baltimore and Chicago.

In my St. Patrick's Day best.

Some pictures from San Fran

A little too cold to take a dip.

Aquarium of the Bay. Jaws IV anyone?

Out to dinner

Alcatraz. Finally where they belong.

Sarah shows off her moves on the cable cars

Thoughts from yesterday's flight 294

I’m sitting on the plane coming back to Baltimore from a few day vacation in San Francisco with Sarah and Allyson. As always, we had a great time. Rarely do you find a trio of more relaxed girls. Not much ruffles our feathers. We don’t really care much what we’re doing. We all run at about the same speed and don’t get too caught up in all the things we should be doing.

In the planning stages, we all (without prompting) came up with one thing we’d like to do while we were in SF and figured the rest would all just kind of fall into place. And it did. We walked China Town, visited the Sea Lions, went on a tour of Alcatraz, checked out the redwoods, spent a day in Sonoma and Napa, found the Ghirardelli chocolate shop, went down the most crooked street in San Francisco, hung off the sides of cable cars, and more. And as proof that we apparently have grown up from our college years, we were up each day by 7 and back in our hotel room by 8:30 each night. Guess we never were really the biggest partiers anyway. :-)

Mostly it was just really nice to catch up (face-to-face) and get to explore something new together again. It’s extraordinarily comforting to know that despite our distance from one another, we are able to start up where we left off and simply enjoy each other.