Our little apartment

We're almost done with our time in temporary housing and I realized I haven't shared any photos of our new joint. Of course, it's not all that exciting so I shall instead use this as excuse to share more cute Benji photos and you'll see our little apartment in the background. You can also see him practicing counting Cheerios in our kitchen (this is a longish video clip).

Benji has been stringing together sets of two words far more regularly. One favorite of his is "Mommy shoe" which can mean anything from "Mommy please put on your shoes so we can go outside" to "Mommy, give me your bunny slippers."


Benji's bedroom here has his crib as well as a queen size bed. He's quite fond of playing on his big bed and sometimes takes naps there.


Our apartment is in a flight patterns for O'Hare so Benji enjoys standing outside the apartment and watching the planes. We even got him his own Duplo airplane to go along with his new interest.





Benji decided that it wasn't good enough to put his animals in the plane, but that he needed to get in the airplane himself.


The living room in the apartment is smaller than our family room at home so even with fewer toys it feels pretty full.


To make Benji feel more at home we brought some of his favorite familiar toys, including his piano. It's so funny to watch him dance to his music!


Benji loves his letters no matter where we are!

The musical blog.

Courtesy of the fine folks at the Handbell Podcast, I've newly put a widget on HPS' right-hand column that will allow you to play my handbell compositions and arrangements while reading my blog. (Don't fret. It won't start automatically, so if you'd instead like to read my blog in silence, or while listening to Justin Timberlake, you may.) I've uploaded the seven comps./arrs. that I have handy, including some, um, out-of-the-handbell-mainstream stuff that I've never posted on the blog before.

Hooked on Phonics

Now I don't want any of you to read this thinking that I'm a crazy parent or that I think my kid is a genius. But I do want to say that kids pick up on more than we give them credit for, if we'd only pay close attention.

We were out at lunch yesterday and Benji wanted to play with the sugar packets while we were reading the menu. He inspected them quite carefully and paid close attention to the letters on the packets. When he lost interest, I cleaned them up and put them away. Later in the meal he stood on the booth and leaned across the table saying something like "ewal, ewal" and possibly with a "peas" thrown in. I couldn't figure out what on earth he wanted and just wanted him to sit down. But when I looked past his gaze and his outstretched arm, I saw the sugar packets and gave him one. That was precisely what he wanted.

No one had read the packets to him at the beginning of the meal, nor had we paid much attention to him at all at that point. Apparently he had been sounding out the words and "read" his first word. We've also been noticing him sounding out "words" (actually just random letters he put together on the fridge) with his refrigerator magnets.

Ten points to the reader who guesses what word Benji read.

Libellés : Benji

Row, row, row your boat

While waiting for some SAS code to run, I went over to Blogger and found a few older unfinished entries. This one dates to February 2007. I think Benji looks quite a bit younger even though it's only five months ago.

While Mommy was doing laundry, Benji decided the laundry basket was a fantastic place to play. I just love the expressions on his face in these few photos.


"I'm so cool lounging in my boat."








During this Benji "era" he got to know the laundry basket not as a basket, but as a "boat" and would go to his room and climb in if we suggested he go to his boat. His Pooh Bear was his first mate and had to get in with him every time we played in the boat. When Pooh went overboard, though, that meant Benji was done and was about to go overboard himself.


While Pooh was the first mate, his "bear pillow" (the bear he now sleeps with) always had to be in there as his back cushion. A big part of the game was for Mommy to rock the boat back and forth and sing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" or the theme to "Gilligan's Island".

Location, location, location!

A couple days ago, a new house came on the market in one of the neighborhoods we're most interested in. We saw from the listing that it was a foreclosure, but it was priced about 10 percent less than a similarly-sized house we're considering buying in that neighborhood, so we got in to see it yesterday. The front door had half its paint scraped off. The garage door was so beat up I doubt it opened. The roof had a 6'x6' area that was severely damaged. Then we walk inside, and all the carpet in the entire house was at least 50% mud-damaged, or drink-damaged, or I-don't-want-to-know-what-damaged. The walls were filled with marks. There was severe water damage on both floors. Everything left in the house was filthy beyond belief.

So why, I'm sure you're asking yourselves, was this awful, awful house only 10 percent less than the house we're interested in? Let's see if you can figure it out from this picture of the house:

Chicago tourists

When we first arrived in Chicago three weeks ago we took a week off to take care of errands and get to know our new town. We did plenty of pragmatic things — got an I-Pass for the tollway, got maps at AAA, looked at neighborhoods for somewhere to live — but we also packed the week with fun activities — the arcade, the park, downtown Chicago, the horse races, and the library.

It's funny how much fun a toddler can have even without putting tokens in the ride. Notice also how tightly he's clutching the tickets even though he has no idea they translate into prizes. As far as he's concerned, they are the prize! He even tried putting them back into the ticket slots and the coin slots on the machines.


We eventually put tokens in this ride, but I think he liked it just as a car to pretend with without the movement.


Vroom, vroom! Benji has been really interested in cars lately, whether it be pushing his cars around the floor or turning a steering wheel, all while saying "vroom, vroom" happily. He also loves to sit in the front seat of "mama car" and pretend to drive.


After seeing some other kids ride the carousel, Benji insisted we ride it with tokens. Mommy had to climb on the midget carousel to make sure Benji didn't climb off.


One of Benji's favorite games at the arcade was "Deal or No Deal." He loved choosing the numbers for the briefcases and even made his own decisions about whether or not to make a deal. He also enjoyed skee-ball, although his participation was mostly limited to taking the ball out of the return slot with an excited "bababa" and giving it to one of us.


Oooh! So many tickets!


Yippee! I won!


We spent one day downtown visiting Uncle Josh on his business trip. We took the train to Union Station, which Benji liked for a while. Since it was a local, it stopped a lot and Benji thought the ride was over every time we stopped. After the train we took the boat taxi on the Chicago River to Michigan Avenue. He wasn't very interested in that, but Mommy really like the view of the architecture.


In Millenium Park one of the sculptures is commonly known as "the bean" or "the jelly bean" although it has some fancier name from the artist. Regardless of the name, it's nifty.


Nothing like a distorted mirror image of yourself, eh?


I'm not sure if Benji is reaching out to his reflection or pushing away.


Benji loves running around on his own and Millenium Park was no exception. (Mommy and Daddy would prefer that he hold our hands a bit more often.)


We had to get some learning in on our trip. Benji wanted to impress Uncle Josh by naming all the letters in the sign.


Another great part of Millenium Park is the big fountain. There are two large glass block towers, one at either end, on which are projected pictures of various people in the city. Periodically water fountains spit out of the people's mouths.


When I saw this fountain for the first time several years ago it was completely empty and completely peaceful. It has since become a kiddie hangout. And now that I have a kiddie, we shall join in the fun.


Benji led Daddy all over the fountain.


It was a very warm day so wandering in the fountain was a great way to cool off.


Benji is already getting a taste for fine art with the lions at the Art Institute (OK, so we didn't actually go in the museum, but someday we will).


We couldn't go to the home of McDonald's without visiting Ronald, could we?


When we went to Arlington Park Racetrack we had to bring Benji down to the paddock to visit the horses. It turns out, though, that he preferred pointing out the numbers to actually checking out the horses.


Mommy let me in! I see numbers to count!

Any nostalgic interest I may have had in seeing Transformers is now gone.

Bumblebee has been recast as a yellow Camero. I kid you not.