Luke Bucci-walker and Darth Pinochle

There is so entirely much to blog about, so I'm sitting down to give it my due attention while Mike gets his fill of his guy tv. But, before I get to all the goings on, I must relate one of the funniest moments of our weekend, taken right from a George Lucas film. Luke found this novelty pen that I picked up at a Peoplesoft conference oh so many moons ago, and when you press a button, it blinks this blue neon LCD light. He carried it around for hours...very timely given that it was "Force of July" on Spike and Return of the Jedi was on. (His hand is covering up the light below).


At one point, he pointed the pen right at Pinochle and made his fighting grunt, usually associated with making clenched fists. Mike vocalized the caption of Luke and Darth Pinochle, and we got a pretty good chuckle out it!

Last weekend, Mike and I got to go on our first getaway sans Luke. Grandma and Pawpaw came to visit and completely spoiled Luke for 4 days while there were here. But, Mike and I headed downtown for the weekend and enjoyed sightseeing, including a stop at the Taste of Chicago.

Friday night, we had dinner at the most amazing restaurant, called Moto. Apparently, the chef was on Iron Chef America and I will tell you, he has to be one of the most creative and artistic chefs ever! You start off with a melba toast cracker and dipping butter that has your menu printed on edible paper and glued to the front of it. They only do tasting menus -10 or 20 courses (we did the 10) - so the portions are smaller, but we definitely did not leave hungry. One of our favorite courses was The Cuban, which was all of the flavors of a Cuban sandwich, rolled up to look like a Cuban cigar, complete with edible paper wrapper, burning "embers" of red sauce, ashes from crushed black and white sesame seeds, served in an ashtray. Very cool.

Saturday night, we hit the Harry Potter exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry.
Even though they were closing things off when we got there, we still managed to sneak in to the Lego display of tall structures.

The rest of our holiday weekend has been spent doing some family things. Friday, we went to the zoo, which I'll save for another blog entry since it involves a great deal of pictures. Yesterday was a bit of a washout, but today was warm and sunny enough to enjoy some outside time. We even went for a family bike ride through the Forest Preserve on our new bikes. Luke loves it so much that when we get home, he does his sign for more. This afternoon, we tried our first Icee pop (not a big fan of it frozen, but warm it up to melt it a bit, and you'll have a taker).
And, he's getting a lot better about using the spoon himself. Trust me, this is a lot less mess than the first time we tried!So, working for me is going well so far. The hardest part has been adjusting to a long commute, which really extends my time away. The job itself has been good...a great team of people and a fun project. Luke has been an absolute star with adjusting to day care. Rather than some tears, most days he'll just wave goodbye to Mike as he drops him off. And, whether it is day care or natural causes, he has started babbling like never before. He has a few word approximations now and routinely says "Da-da." I'm keeping an open mind about what the fall will bring and trying to not rush into any decisions in the midst of my job experiment.