Meet me in St. Louis // Our first family vacation!

Our little family took our very first vacation together last weekend, to St. Louis. We'd been planning the trip for months—Frank's favorite baseball team, the Phillies, were playing in St. Louis Saturday and he wanted to see them in person at least once this summer. Plus Frank's college roommate and his wife live in St. Louis and are avid Cardinals fans, so we planned to meet up with them for the game and dinner afterward.

Our original plan was to drive there Friday night or Saturday morning and then drive back Saturday night, but at the last minute, Frank decided we should make a getaway out of it and stay all weekend instead. I'm so glad he decided that—this mini-vacation was just what the doctor ordered.

I was worried how the 4.5-ish hour drive would go with the baby in the car, but thankfully he handled it like a champ. He slept a lot of the way, so Frank and I got to partake in one of my VERY favorite pastimes—a road-trip singalong with all the greats, John Denver and Frank Sinatra and Mumford.

That time in the car was really special. The first months after having a baby involve a lot of adjustment in a marriage, and it's hard lately to feel as connected as we used to. But singing and being silly together in the car reminded me of another car singalong from early in our relationship and rekindled that happy-and-in-love feeling. The whole trip was worth it for that alone—but the fun was just beginning.

We woke up early on Saturday morning to hit up the St. Louis Zoo first thing. My grandma likes to say, "Whenever our family visits a new city, the first place we go is the zoo," so I guess I was being true to tradition there. I texted my dad and grandma that I was at the zoo, and my dad wrote back, "Did you know you went to that same zoo when you were 6?" and my grandma texted back "Did you know I took your dad to that same zoo when he was 4?" Neither my dad nor I remember our first St. Louis Zoo trips, so Frankie is holding to family tradition by not remembering his first visit either.

He looked like this for most of the visit:

But Frank and I loved it. We were really impressed with the exhibits. I think it's my new favorite zoo in the world!

We spotted a mother elephant with her baby and I just felt this kinship, you know?

We also met this friendly young bear:

And this orangutan who was just so over it all:

I'll spare you the other 200 animal pictures I took on my phone, but sadly I didn't get a picture of my favorite animal exhibit—we saw two hippos fighting each other in the water! They were legit dueling it out, cage-match style, with angry noises and wide open mouths and much churning of the water. I would be terrified to encounter that in the wild. It was one of the coolest things I've seen at a zoo in my life.

One other awesome thing about that zoo—at one point the baby got really hungry, so I found a bench, pulled out the nursing cover and tried to feed him. But it was over 90 degrees out and pretty soon we were both sweating to death under that cover, plus random teenagers were staring, and both mama and baby were approaching a meltdown. Frank was looking at the zoo map, and in the map key I saw a lactation room just a few yards from us! We went to find it, and I was able to nurse in a comfortable chair in a completely private, air conditioned room. It was incredible. Lactation rooms are one of those little services that I never would have thought of before becoming a mom, but now they are INVALUABLE. Major props to the St. Louis Zoo for that little touch.

After a few hours at the zoo, we returned to the hotel to meet Frank's friends and head out to Busch Stadium. It was baby's first baseball game!

By the way, I put the above picture on Facebook, and it tried to tag Frankie as my sister Lillian. I'm not sure that's a compliment to her, but it does mean my genes are strong in this child. Yes!!!!

When we first arrived at the game, I panicked. The temperature was still in the 90s and our seats were in the sun. I may try to be a laid-back mom, but I was not going to sit my 7-week-old outside in that kind of weather. Luckily, like at the zoo, the first aid station was open for nursing moms. I spent at least half the game in there with Frankie, enjoying the air conditioning. We didn't rejoin Frank and our friends until the sun had moved so our seats were in shadow.

I took a bunch of pictures of Frankie in his way-too-big Phillies gear. He was one happy little fan:

After the game we went to Chili's for margaritas and dinner. Here's Frank with his college roommate. They had a great time telling stories about "the old days" and all the goofy shenanigans they got up to. Oh, and Josh gave Frank a Cardinals shirt, just to make him squirm. :)

On Sunday, we went to the beautiful St. Louis Cathedral Basilica for Mass. These pictures can't do justice to the magnificence of that place:

We took a short tour of the church after Mass, and checked out the museum in the basement and the Cathedral gift shop before leaving. The gift shop was selling copies of Michele's and Amy's book, which I've been wanting to read for a while, so I bought a copy—the perfect souvenir.

Frankie wore his dapper Sunday best:

After that we headed on home, totally refreshed. Such a great weekend.

By the way, if you're interested, my instagram handle is tessciv. It's hard to find time to blog these days, but I update instagram almost every day—I'm kind of addicted—so follow me over there if you'd like!

Back on the {pretty, happy, funny, real} bandwagon!

Goodness, it's been forever since I did one of these! Here are a few great moments from the past few weeks.

{pretty}

 

The sky on the Fourth of July, before fireworks—isn't it glorious?

{happy}

The other Saturday I woke up to the smell of fresh cinnamon buns and coffee. Frank had made me breakfast.

Lately he's been using cooking as a break from bar-exam studying, and it's the best, because that man can cook!

{funny}

Angela made us a thank-you note for letting her sleep over the other night.

What really slays me is how she chose to address Frank:

Can you see that the bottom says "Frankinsense"? Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (one of our favorite movies) inspired this awesome new nickname for Frank.

{real}

I'm still trying to get the hang of baseball...

 

But I will say, I've been really enjoying going to the games.

Thank you to the lovely ladies of Our Mother's Daughters for hosting!

Our First Sunday in Chicago

I feel a little silly calling this our first Sunday in Chicago, considering we've been back from Rome for three Sundays in a row. But the past two Sundays we ventured out to the suburbs for Mass with my family, so this was our first time doing the whole "newlywed Mass-and-brunch" thing in the city. It was awesome!

First, a huge THANK YOU to everyone who's recommended St. John Cantius over the years, and especially to Katrina and JoAnna for their golden comments on my last post. We loved it. We went to the 11 am Latin Mass, and Frank summed it up best after we left: "Services like that are the reason I became Catholic." We're looking forward to check out the 12:30 Tridentine soon too.

One of my favorite parts of our usual Sunday routine is chatting with friends outside the church after Mass. But since Frank and I were complete newbies at this church, I resigned myself to skipping it this week. I was about to awkwardly sidle out (secretly envying the regular parishioners who were chatting it up with their friends), when the sweetest lady who reads my blog came up and introduced herself! I was so excited and thrilled to meet her. I admired her beautiful baby Frances Gianna (such a great name), introduced her to Frank, and pretty much died of joy that I actually had someone to chat with. Then another girl came up and asked, "Are you Lillian's twin?"—she knows Lillian from her Chicago days—and we chatted as well. I secretly said a prayer of thanks that I had new friends to talk to after all—such a nice surprise.

Before the homily, the priest had announced that the new Dunkin Donuts down the street was holding a fundraiser for the parish, donating money for every large coffee purchased. Frank and I adore iced coffee—in fact, he introduced me to it (somehow I never tried it before I met him)—so we immediately gave each other the side-eye that meant, "We're getting iced coffee after this!" And for a good cause too ... even better!

We ambled over to Dunkin Donuts, where Frank pretended not to know me while I took a picture of the receipt collection box:

 

^^I thought the little watercolor of the church and the description were so sweet.

And then I had to laugh when I noticed that instead of Boston Kremes, the store was featuring "Chicago Kremes":

 

It's because the Blackhawks were playing the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup. The Hawks apparently won the cup last night. (I would definitely not know that if I weren't married to Frank). 

Despite my lack of following hockey, I'm doing pretty well with my plan to learn baseball ... I'm going to a White Sox game with Frank tonight, and again on Saturday. I'm so excited! Any tips or advice for enjoying/understanding a baseball game?

Later in the day we went to Trader Joe's, where we had lengthy conversations with the salespeople about the best gin to use for gin and tonics, various uses for buttermilk, etc. I came away concluding that Midwesterners are the nicest, friendliest people. It made me just a little bit more excited about moving back to Chicago—and that's saying something, because I've really been missing DC these days.

The most important purchase of the day, in my mind, was this little basil plant:

I dream of someday having a great big garden and growing lots of our own vegetables, and the basil plant represents the start of our garden. I also dream that someday we'll have chickens ... and dogs ... and maybe even a horse! (Ok, that last one's a long shot.)

Not that I'm ready to leave our tiny apartment. In fact, I'm so proud of the way it's looking. We did a ton of unpacking and cleaning Sunday, and now the place is practically ship-shape. :)

While Frank got his work done (the bar exam is our constant companion this summer), I pulled out my calendar and planned meals for the week. Did you hear that? I planned real live meals! :P After the past two weeks of throwing together pasta or tacos after work most nights, it's a big help to have a real written plan, with groceries bought in advance.

^^Mid-planning, with some of my favorite cookbooks.

I also baked a bunch of different things over the weekend. I made chocolate chip banana bread on Saturday, and yesterday I mixed up regular bread—here it is while mid-rising:

^^This was my first time using a Kitchenaid Mixer (one of our wedding gifts) and oh my gosh. I didn't know what I was missing.

I also got a little wild with dessert and made Chia Seed Pudding using a Trader Joe's recipe. It turned out pretty well—Frank said it was indistinguishable from tapioca pudding—but in case you're thinking about making it, I have to warn you, it looks like this:

Not the most appetizing sight.

Meanwhile, Frank had big plans for dinner. He kept a pot of ribs simmering temptingly all afternoon:

If you compare those last two photos, it's pretty obvious who is the real chef in our family. I aspire to someday reach his level.

On the plus side, I'm a master at making gin and tonics. Yesterday Frank declared me the official G&T maker of the family.

Finally we sat down to dinner on our little balcony:

And feasted like kings. Or like a king and a queen, in this case.

Finally, in case this post wasn't long enough already, I wanted to tell you about two books I'm reading that are having a big impact on my life. I had a feeling you might be interested in them too!

I've been reading Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, a wedding gift from the lovely Molly. This book is incredibly useful if you want to cook your food at home, but you're not sure where to draw the line on "homemade"—at what point does cooking from scratch become cost- and effort-prohibitive? The author tried making pretty much every food imaginable from scratch. She even kept chickens to use for eggs, bought goats for milk, and set up beehives in her backyard for honey. She offers a price comparison of store-bought vs. homemade on hundreds of different recipes, and ranks how much "hassle" each recipe is too. I'm a little obsessed with this book—it's super helpful, and it's what inspired me to bake my own bread this week (and homemade hamburger buns too!). It's the perfect first book to set us up for our "modern Little House" way of life.

The other book I just started is the official biography of Maria Montessori by her close friend and collaborator E. M. Standing. I'm only a few chapters in, and already I'm fascinated by her life story and how she developed her educational method. Most of all, I can't believe how sensible the Montessori approach is—it just works so well with the way children actually are. If I wasn't a big fan of it before, this book would make me one. Have you read it, or are you familiar with it?

Well, that's all for now. Happy Tuesday, and I hope you're enjoying this lovely summer weather!

My Quest to Love Baseball

Frank is a huge baseball fan. It's his number one conversation topic with his friends, his favorite childhood memories all involve the Phillies, and he has multiple fantasy baseball teams a year.

Pretty early on he realized this was not the case for me. While I enjoy a trip to the old ball game and snacking on stadium food as much as the next person, for most of our relationship I really had no clue how baseball worked.

Although I was more than happy to take pictures in front of bobblehead-doll baseball players.

Recently Frank mentioned that one of his friends, whose wife loves baseball, had taken his wife to their team's opening day game and posted Facebook pictures of themselves in matching jerseys. That set the wheels turning in my mind. A shared interest in baseball brought that couple closer together. Why shouldn't the same be true for Frank and me?

Tickets to the Marlins game, a generous gift from my uncle

But I didn't decide to actually learn about baseball until a few days later, when Frank and I were talking about dancing. Dancing is to me what baseball is to Frank: I love it, while Frank tolerates it in small doses. I'm hoping to take dance lessons with him at some point, and I commented that he would probably like dancing if he had more practice. "You can learn anything you put your mind to," I said.

As those words left my mouth, I realized they applied to me and baseball just as much as to him and dancing. Why shouldn't I learn more about his interests, after all? Especially if I was asking him to learn more about mine.

So I made up my mind to learn about baseball. And not just to learn about it—to love it. I remembered  a line from one of my favorite books, A Severe Mercy. The couple agrees that "If one of us likes anything, there must be something to like in it—and the other one must find it." If Frank loves baseball, there must be something to love about it!

I started off pretty slow—as Frank said the other night, his voice a mixture of shock and horror, "I didn't realize you didn't even know the difference between a ball and a strike." True. I also didn't know the difference between a no-hitter and a perfect game, or the purpose of a shortstop, or what RBIs or ERAs are, or how many games are in a World Series, or what the designated hitter rule is. But I've learned all those things in just the past week.

I started by asking for advice from all my friends who like baseball. They've been so helpful. My roommate Heather lent me an awesome book comparing baseball to Christianity, the lovely JoAnna explained that baseball is philosophical and suggested using a scorecard to understand the games, and Patrick constructed a miniature baseball diamond of plates and napkins on my dining room table. Conor laughed at me: "Only you would try to learn baseball by reading a book, Tess." But then he talked to me about Bill Mazeroski and the ninth-inning walk-off in the 1960 World Series, and my mind expanded. I'm trying to take it all in and learn as much as I can, and I'm asking Frank to please take me to at least one baseball game before the wedding.

So this is it—the start of my Great Quest to Love Baseball. I'm giving it my best shot and I'm really excited to keep learning. I hope that at the very least, someday when Frank is coaching our son's Little League team, I'll be able to go to all the games and actually understand what's going on. And if I happen to become the newest Number One Fan of the White Sox along the way ... that wouldn't be so bad either. :)

Are you a baseball fan? Do you have any tips? I would love to hear why you like the game, how you learned about it, and any other advice!


p.s. Thanks to Sarah for this lovely little reflection on our dinner last week. My take on it here.