Saturday

Dan and I took Vincent to the playground around the corner this morning-- Dan left for a week-long conference this afternoon on the outer banks of North Carolina (tough life, this academic gig!) so he wanted to spend some time with the boy before being gone for so long. He'll get back and Vincent and I leave for upstate NY less than a week later for ten days or so, then Dan will drive out to meet us and we'll visit with some friends for a week before coming back to Chicago in early July. Phew! Where was I?

So V was adorable at the park showing his daddy all his new stunts that he can do, and we generally had a terrific time. After his nap, I took Vincent back to the park for the annual neighborhood festival called the Raven (our neighborhood is Ravenswood). They have two inflatable moonwalk like things, which Vincent went totally berserk jumping in. They also had a small petting zoo, which Vincent LOVED, he hung out with a huge llama, and pairs of donkeys, chickens, and calves, and many goats and sheep. After much hand-sanitizing ;) we split a funnel cake. Apparently fried dough is an east coast invention, in the midwest they have funnel cake, maybe they drop the dough through a funnel into the hot oil to fry? Either way it's the same powdered sugar basic result, though funnel cake has more fried outside than doughy inside, which I think is kind of a loss. Easier to eat the funnel cake though... We go back tomorrow, hopefully it will be warmer (today it was 60 degrees and rained on and off, blech).

So now it's just me, Vincent, and Uncle Robbie for the next week. Robbie is on a training tear, he is teaching Ivan all kinds of stuff. Tonight it was "come", "speak", and "target" (which involves Ivan touching his nose to your fist, which means you can get him to go anywhere). Ivan is so excited about it he's becoming insufferable for the attention. He keeps going up to Robbie and sitting in front of him expectantly. Really funny.