2006 In Review

December, 2006

It’s that time of year again when you can strap on your seatbelt and enjoy the ride on the highway of family madness. Without further adieu, we present 2006 in review:

December 05/January 06: We hosted Dave’s family in Michigan between Christmas and New Year’s while Dave’s brother Mike used our house in Chicago. What are the odds that our shower in Chicago and our shower in Michigan would simultaneously stop working? We literally had plumbers in both homes at the same time trying to fix the same problem – just 75 miles apart. In the last hurrah of the year, Su and Michelle Charles decided to take the girls to breakfast at the Walnut Room. After waiting in line…outside…for 45 minutes, we finally made in the doors of the hallowed halls of the State Street Marshall Fields to be greeted by the local news channels. “How does it feel to have Marshall Fields CANCEL breakfast on New Year’s Eve? Does it bother you that they never let anyone know?” All we could say was, “Tis the season….”

February: Every February we enjoy the bliss of having happy, sunshine days and no more black clouds over our lives. Of course, this would be the shortest month of the year, but truthfully nothing too exciting to report for February (don’t worry – keep reading, we make up for it later).

March: Delaney is given the “Student of the Month” award at Blaine. She was “caught” cleaning up after some other kids, and generally being quite helpful. Max enters his terrible two’s – as we jokingly say, “If he was the first, he’d be an only child. Dave “advises” Su that he’ll be doing a boy’s ski trip for a long weekend. Oh yeah, and maybe tie in a work trip either before or after the ski trip…or both. Yep – Dave left Su with three kids for NINE days. When you read years from now that Su has taken a month-long girls trip out of the country, you won’t question it and you definitely won’t feel sorry for Dave.

April: Dave, Su and Jack all celebrate birthdays this month. In fact, at dinner our dear friend Emily turned to Su and asked, “Are you celebrating a big one?” Thanks Emily…and the answer of course is “Not yet.” And Dave did manage to remember Su’s birthday with minimal prodding. We spent Easter in Michigan. With Su’s parents watching the kids, Dave and Su snuck out of the house to go purchase goodies for the kids Easter baskets. What happened next is simply a tragedy – on the way to the store, Dave swerves in an effort to miss (which is debatable) a bunny but thankfully not the Easter Bunny… We now have a lucky charm in the tire of our Cooper.

May: Christopher and Emily joined us in Michigan for a weekend away. As many of you may remember, we sold our Union Pier home last year and moved three miles to Three Oaks. Suddenly, after putting the kids to bed and enjoying a glass of wine in the living room, the electricity went out. While all of our neighbors had generators, we being the Chicago-folk ran around the house to find…a battery operated boombox to plug in our IPod. Who needs light if you have good tunes? Christopher and Dave decided to drive around the neighborhood to see how far the outage was and see our neighbors sitting outside on the back of the pickups waiting out the outage. Dave wanted to stop but realized the neighbors wouldn’t appreciate the city folks pulling up in a Mini-Cooper convertible. This leads to Dave’s “brilliant” thought, “Hey, maybe we should get a country car, you know our neighbor’s won’t take us seriously driving around the Cooper”. Good idea, Dave. We have decided we are ‘Citybillys’. Sometimes you can’t take the City out of us as much as we try to fit into the country.

June: Our friends Mike and Helen Cameron (who’s Uncommon restaurant will go unnamed…) used our Michigan home. The pool looked so inviting that who needs swimsuits when you’re on 15 acres, right? Too bad, we failed to advise them when the pool cleaners were coming, We got a note the following week from the pool company to remind our guests the days of service, and to maybe wear their bathing suits. J Delaney has her first lemonade stand, selling lemonade and water to thirsty Cub fans and hiring Max and Jack to “just act cute”. After negotiating a good corner to set up her stand (you don’t want to mess with the regular’s and their corners), Delaney makes $60. After paying Dave and Su their parental commission, Delaney has just enough money to buy a snickers bar. Dave has discovered how to pay for college.

July: We took the kids to see the Su's family in beautiful Seattle, where the sun does not set this time of year until 11:00 p.m. We took the kids to the fireworks, which were held behind a small, 2-story office building. When the alarm system in the office building sounded, we just assumed some juvenile delinquents were trying to break into the building. What we didn’t realize was that one of the fireworks started a brush fire on the back-side of the building. When the flames turned the corner and headed to us, we did as all Seattle-ites do…just take a couple of steps back and continue watching the fireworks. When the flames were finally bigger than the kids, we thought maybe we should head back to the car…and continue to watch the fireworks. Delaney and Jack stay in Seattle with the grandparents while Dave and Su bring Max back home to begin potty training. First time in 7 years we haven’t bought diapers - we now have enough money to buy that Country Car – Dave’s thinking Pickup Truck – Su’s thinking not.

August: Delaney celebrated her seventh birthday. Upon return from a birthday manicure and pedicure (they start young, don’t they) Su and Delaney see a host of police cars and officers in front of our house. Dave rushes Su and Delaney inside while Dave talks with the officers. Apparently, while Su and Delaney were gone, Dave noticed a “strange man” peeking his head in our neighbor’s backyard. So, Dave being the good citizen calls the police. While Dave’s on the phone, the would-be-robber jumps the neighbors fence and takes off with the Trek bike (leaving behind his Huffy…apparently he was trading up). The cops catch him at the corner and thanks to Dave, the neighborhood crime rate has gone down for the month of August. The neighbors all congregate on our front porch to “relive Dave’s heroic actions” when we notice another “strange man” coming out of our gangway. With maybe 15 people on our front porch, the “strange man” was somewhat polite and said “Excuse me” as he tried to dodge the myriad of children. When someone yelled out, “Hey!” the “strange man” took off down the street with Dave and Eric Anderson in pursuit. Since the cops had only made it to the end of the block, they cut him off at the corner and clearly the robber had “been there, done that” as he quickly lay on the ground spread eagle. Turns out while Dave had taken the cops through our garage to show them where the first robber was, the second robber slipped into our garage and broke into our car. Since the second robber was on probation, Dave had to testify in court as the DA was trying to put him away for 8 years. All for stealing a first aid kit out of our car, that we never knew we had. Oh yeah, Jack and Delaney both had their tonsils and adenoids out.

September: Max ran away from home – it’s true. While in Michigan, Max took his blanket, and headed down the driveway and around the corner. Thankfully a neighbor brought him back home – but the lesson learned, “That kid is a sneaky one!” Need a way to insure your spouse never flies again? Simply use their briefcase and then don’t empty it out before your spouse uses it again. As Su was making her way to Florida, she used the “joint” roller-briefcase. Just as she was going through security, Su decides to put her wallet in the front pocket. Funny – it didn’t fit, what’s in there? Su reaches her hand in the front pocket and pulls out a bag of unmarked pills, a giant glue stick, shoelaces, chapstick and the clincher…a giant BOX CUTTER. Yes, pretty much everything was in the briefcase except the Koran and detailed instructions. Thanks Dave! Oh yeah, remember that country car? Not a Pickup but a Jeep which is as country as we could handle at this point.

October/November: October was probably the longest month of 2006, so long that we’re not sure where October ended and November started. Missing the home cooking of the hospital food, Su heads to UCH for a little surgery, anesthesia and R&R. Dave makes Su’s hospital room his personal Yahoo! South office location – even managed to get a WiFi connection in the room. Unfortunately that meant Dave sucked all the energy out of the operating rooms just to stay online. After a couple of days, Su was discharged to go back home where Grandma Lee was waiting to play nurse maid. Five days at home, and Su was ready…to go back to the hospital. Since Dave decided that California was much warmer this time of year, Su recruited Emily to spend far too long in the ER while a room was being found. After another four days, Su was discharged and we sent Grandma Lee back home to Seattle since we had Bridget to care for the kids. After a couple of days at home, Su noticed that Bridget wasn’t looking too good. “Umm...are you okay Bridget? Do you need me to take you to the doctor?” Su loaded up Bridget and Max, bypassed the doctor and went straight to the ER. After getting Bridget admitted, Su brought Max home and contacted Bridget’s husband Seth to go straight to the hospital. An hour later, Su gets a phone call from Seth, “Su, our car broke down.” “Hmm..okay Seth. Take a cab to our house and use our car.” Turns out Bridget’s heart was racing and she was admitted to the cardiac floor. “Mom? I know you’ve only been home for two days, but do you think you might want to fly back to Chicago? The grandkids miss you.” After giving Bridget some much needed rest, we finally sent Grandma Lee packing. And then suddenly it’s Thanksgiving. We hosted Dave’s family in Michigan for our annual Turkey cook-off. And this year? We like to think it was a tie. Su got a phone call late in the evening from Bridget. “Su – Seth and I were driving to the store and then we stopped at the stop sign and got rear ended…by a CTA BUS!” The car was totaled and now Bridget wasn’t feeling too good. “Bridget – get off the phone with me and go to the hospital.” So back to the hospital Bridget went and spent a couple of days getting the best chicken broth and IV fluid diet known to man.

December: We hosted the annual Lakeview Pantry Toy Drive. The weather conditions in Chicago on the day of the party, were nothing short of “tropical” – okay, it was the first big snow storm of the year. But we had 250 people turn out and collected 600+ toys for the kids. As always, we head to IHOP for a greasy breakfast at 2:00 a.m. with the Haites and Su’s brother Jeff. We decided to leave Jeff’s illegally parked car while we’re having breakfast and pick it up on the way back.. One problem, on return at 3:00 a.m. the car is GONE! Welcome to Chicago Jeff, we have tow trucks here…and unfortunately, vandalized of his tip money. Here’s to hoping that Jeff comes back next year! The following weekend, we hosted our annual “Breakfast with Santa”. Since all parties that start in our house eventually end up Murphy’s Bleachers, this was no exception. With 150 people at the party, the best quote of the day was from Beth Murphy who described the party as, “It’s like a Cubs game…just smaller people.” The rest of December will encompass Christmas with family followed by a family vacation on the Disney Cruise with the kids.