We are happy to announce the arrival of two new family members:

Theodore Ansel (on the left in the photo)
6lbs 7oz

Gwendolen Rose (on the right in the photo)
6lbs 13oz

Mother and babies are doing well!

Chris & Melissa

It is the night before delivery. Melissa has felt ready for the babies to arrive for some time now. Everett and Chris have has been eager to meet them. Cress and Amanda arrived Tuesday night in preparation. The weather today was beautiful, so we had dinner outside on the patio (tacos and tostadas).


After dinner Chris and Everett practiced bike riding.

A betting pool has been setup to guess gender, weight and length.

Everett has recently acknowledged that the babies might not always be pleasant to be around. “So, the babies are going to be sort of annoying but we will be really happy that they are here.” He has also started putting some of his toys away so that the babies don’t get them. This is interesting because up to this point he hasn’t had to compete with anyone for toys or attention, and it’s not clear to us how it occurred to him that he might need to.

In the evening Chris noticed that the word of the day on the screensaver on Melissa’s computer was nuit blanche: a sleepless night.

This summer Everett is growing much more independent. He has always been very social, and now he has started to take a much bigger interest in developing his own friendships, especially with the kids in the neighborhood. When he was younger it seemed that the kids became friends because of mutual interest by the parents, especially the Moms. This has now reversed: many of the children in the neighborhood are friends, and as a result the adults talk to each other much more often than we would otherwise.

We were home for July 4th this year. Under normal circumstances on Independence Day our schedule would be:
-Chris goes for a morning ride with the Spokesmen. At the end of the ride we roll down the parade route on North Ave and wave to admiring fans of middle-aged men on expensive road bikes.
-Chris returns home and picks up the family. We return to the parade route and watch for a couple hours.
-In the afternoon we go to Hart Park for festivities
-In the evening we watch the fireworks, either from the field behind our house or from Hart Park.

However, these are not normal times. Melissa is in the home stretch with her pregnancy. She is also very uncomfortable and has pretty limited mobility. Bike riding is out for her (though Chris tried repeatedly to get her to ride in the Bakfiets, or on the Pugsley), as is walking along the parade route in the hot sun. So we followed an alternate plan:
-Chris rode with the Spokesmen as usual, including the parade route.
-He rode home, picked up Everett and went back to the parade route while Melissa stayed home. Chris and Everett found some Y-tribe friends, and soon afterward we found Sam, George and Emma.


-We stayed home for the rest of the day. Everett took a nap in the afternoon so that he could stay up late. We cooked a steak dinner on the grill, and afterward walked over to the Marx’s house (two doors up the hill) for conversation and sparklers.

-Chris and Everett joined several neighbors by walking to Hart Park to watch the fireworks.

On Saturday Chris & Everett went for a bike ride to feed the ducks (and rid our kitchen of the many bags of old bread we save for duck food).

Everett played hard the rest of the day at home and with friends in the neighborhood. This activity level is resulting in high sleep inertia at the end of the day. That evening Everett was too tired to eat but too hungry to sleep. He said he was starving and had a stomach ache. Chris served him dinner and he promptly put his head on the dining room table and fell asleep so soundly that he fell out of his chair. Fortunately Chris was walking through the room at the moment and caught him. We gave him a bath, which woke him up enough to eat, and by the time we got him to bed he was feeling back to normal. Melissa and Chris agree that this degree of fun and exhaustion is how summers should be at his age.

Everett’s last day of school was on June 14th.

The last day that Chris and Everett rode to school together was June 12th (Chris was traveling from the 12th to the 14th). During the last two weeks of school we started seeing definitive signs of spring: a mother duck and her ducklings from the bike path under the Mayfair Road bridge; a pair of geese and their goslings in the Menomonee River at at Hoyt Park.

Also, this spring and summer there has been a rabbit family living in our backyard: a couple months ago we awoke one morning to see the mother and three babies hopping around Everett’s fort. Since then we have only seen one baby at a time, but we have noticed them pretty consistently. Some animal, perhaps a rabbit, has been helping themselves to the strawberry vine in the backyard. This was frustrating because we finally convinced Everett to pick the strawberries when they are almost falling off the vine. He has been picking them and eating them as soon as they turn red, at which point they are still pretty sour. As soon as we convinced him to wait then some other animal started eating them. We plan to setup Chris’ motion-triggered camera to identify the culprit.

June 16th was Father’s Day. Amanda was staying with us to help out Everett and Melissa while Chris traveled the previous week. We had a delicious breakfast, and spent the day at the pool and around the house, then cooked out in the evening. At one point Chris was working at his desk on the computer and Everett walked up and said “I want you to do something fun on Father’s day. So turn that off and do something fun!” Chris was given an awesome new wallet and a handmade card from Everett. Bonus: every morning for the next week Everett announced that it was Father’s Day when he woke up.

Everett was enrolled in swim lessons and afternoon day camp starting on the first day of summer vacation, June 17th. This lasted for two weeks, and now he is attending morning summer camp until August.

We recently found a giant fungus on a tree between our house and the village.

Everett seems intrigued by it and wants to see it often – “the fungus way” is the name of a new bike route we follow to check on it. We cut a chunk off to examine and bring back to the house. Good thing, because the entire fungus was removed a couple weeks later.

Storms blew over our town in the middle of the night on Friday June 21st, and resulted in the loudest thunder we have ever heard. At first Chris wasn’t even sure it was thunder because it sounded more like an explosion than a thunderclap. Judging from the delay between the flash and the time we heard it, the lightning bolts were quite far away. Nonetheless, they produced shock waves that shook our house and reverberated for 20 or 30 seconds. It was phenomenal.

On June 23rd Chris was walking Kyra at dusk and saw the first fireflies of the year. He also saw several bats flying through the air in the field behind our house. They were most likely hunting for dinner, despite the fact that we have seen very few mosquitos so far this year. Everett loves bats because they use echolocation. And he loves fireflies (actually, I think everyone we know does as well) and asks about them daily. Our experience has been that the best way to find them is to sit quietly and watch from our front step. On June 29th Everett took a nap so that he could stay up late, and we did manage to find a few fireflies in the front yard. It wasn’t many, but then again it doesn’t seem quite warm enough for them. We haven’t yet had consistently hot weather this year – perhaps this is why both fireflies and mosquitos have been scarce.

The weather has been very strange lately. We have had a lot of rain, sometimes several rainstorms a day. The cool weather has meant that we haven’t used the air conditioning very much, and instead have had the windows open at night. Normally this would be perfect sleeping weather but instead we are often awakened by train horns. The reason is that about 30 trains a day come through Tosa, and currently the city is in a dispute with the Federal Railroad Administration about an application to continue a train horn ban (also, see here for a little more history). In the past we were dimly aware of the rumble of trains several times a day. Now we (and everyone else in the area) are very aware of the train traffic – the horns are long, loud and are sounded many times. We are about a half mile from the tracks with a large intervening hill, and we can only imagine what it must be like for houses across the street from the tracks. When Chris was Everett’s age he couldn’t get enough of trains. We’ll see how Everett feels about them at the end of the summer.

On Sunday morning Chris was mowing the grass when Brad, Sarah, Eli and Henry pulled into the driveway, and this set off a series of events that culminated when Chris and Melissa got to observe Everett when he spontaneously decided to read (without assistance) about the Neurosciences Center at Chris’ work.

A few years ago Melissa and Everett got to know Sarah and Eli during story time at the downtown library. Since then Chris and Brad became friends, and Henry was born last year, and all of us try to get together when we can even though they moved to Miami several years ago. For the past two summers they have been housesitting in Milwaukee and this allowed us to spend a fair amount of time together. This summer the closest they could manage was Chicago for a couple weeks, and we are thankful that we could all get together for a day. Their arrival on Sunday morning provided Chris with an excuse to quit mowing and start relaxing. The group of us stayed at the house for a while and talked while the boys performed dental surgery using Play-Doh.

Then we went outside and made bubbles, then chatted some more and had lunch, and finally decided that we should head to the pool. This was one of the first really hot days we have had this summer (though according to our friends this was borderline cold weather by Miami standards). The pool was at capacity and we got in just before a long line formed at the gate.

They stayed until about 3:45pm, which left us 15 minutes to go to Henry Marx’s graduation party and congratulate him. Afterward, Chris and Melissa got ready for a fundraising dinner for Chris’ work while Everett stayed at the Marx’s house and played with neighborhood kids the rest of the evening.

On Monday Chris came home around midday to eat and finish mowing the lawn. During lunch Everett picked up a magnet that we received at dinner the night before and spontaneously decided to start reading.

This is the first time this has ever happened, and we were both very proud and excited, especially considering the subject matter! We will try to keep encouraging this over the summer, along with learning to ride a bike and swim.

Today something happened that I knew was coming, I just wasn’t sure when. For the first time Everett figured out that a lot of people can see the pictures of him on the website, and he asked me not to include one because it’s embarrassing. For the record it’s a picture of him eating an ice cream sundae on his birthday. As many parents know, a child’s definition of “embarrassing” is a moving target and could change dramatically over time. I’m also curious to find out how he will react when he learns to read and he discovers how much of his life is described here. In the meantime I do want to honor his requests, though I’m not sure exactly how yet. I could start redacting the site to remove anything he doesn’t like, but I can think of several reasons why this probably isn’t a good approach. Another idea is to restrict access to the website so that only friends and family can see it. A third is to explain to him the social media movement, and point out that these days people divulge so many details of their lives that disclosures about any single person might not generate attention, especially when it’s not on Facebook. We are open to suggestions about the best way to handle this, and we are certainly curious how other families handle these situations.

Everett turned five this June. Frankly, I’m not sure how this happened. The years are going by so quickly. He had a three-day birthday celebration this year.

Part I: School Celebration

The custom at Everett’s school is to bring fruit salad and sing happy birthday at about 10:30am while the birthday child walks around the room. First they hold a globe and everyone sings “The earth goes round the sun tra la la”, then they show pictures of themselves from each prior year of their life.


We had to plan this on Thursday June 6th because on Friday the Wauwatosa Fire Department was bringing their fire safety house to the school, and this would take up most of the morning.

Part II: Home Celebration

Everett woke up Friday morning at 5:15am and appeared at Chris’ side, which has never happened before (that we know of). We convinced him to go back to sleep, and then all of us overslept for school and work. Everett was allowed to open one present at breakfast: a dragon puppet from Noni!

And yes, the dragon went to school with us. We left on the bike at about 7:45 and barely made it to school in time. While we were on our way Everett asked “When it’s summertime, can you not go to work?”

For his 5th birthday Everett got to chew his first stick of gum. At some point our dentist told him that he can’t chew gum until he is five. He must have been thinking about this for a long time, because that was near the top of his list of things to do. He went through every stick in a pack of gum (bubble gum flavor!) in about 24 hours, sharing a few with other people.

Chris came home from work for lunch and opening presents, and that evening Everett wanted to invite Mary and her family over for Balistreri’s pizza, salad, cake and ice cream.

Part III: Birthday Party

Everett’s birthday party was on Saturday June 8th at Swiss Turner’s Gymnastics Academy. He got to invite 11 friends for about an hour of guided gymnastics activity including jumping in foam pits, jumping on a trampoline, navigating an obstacle course and spinning the parachute.

After gym time the kids came up to the party room for cake, ice cream and presents.

It went really well! He had asked for a dragons and knights party. For his birthday cake he wanted a chocolate and vanilla dragon cake with green icing. Chris looked at many designs on the internet, and was considering one in particular until the prior weekend when he found out that Everett’s friend George also wanted a knights and dragons party, and Lynette made George the exact cake we were considering. Hmm, can’t have that. So Chris experimented with other designs. He was going to make a serpent out of Bundt cakes, but Melissa pointed out that this was more like a Chinese dragon and we wanted more of a European dragon considering the knights theme. We eventually converged on a novel design with bits of both. Around the time when we were debating how to add fire breath, Grandaddy decided to go out in search of dry ice. His original motivation was how much fun he heard that we had recently with a block of it, but as soon as he got some we began to figure out a way to incorporate it into the cake. We propped open the dragon’s mouth and added dry ice and hot water. Voila! A fire-breathing dragon.

After the party he wanted to go to Café Hollander for dinner. Despite all of this activity during the day he couldn’t fall asleep until after 10pm. Perhaps too much of a nap during the afternoon? Or perhaps too much sugar and chocolate? Good times nonetheless!

Happy Birthday Everett!

Under normal circumstances this is what we would have done for Memorial Day weekend: go to the Clifty Falls Camping Extravaganza, listen to the Indianapolis 500 on a vintage AM radio from the 1980s, and then return to Cinci or Tosa to celebrate Memorial Day in proper style with parades and cookouts and a tribute to those who have served this country. However, these are not normal times. We’ve written many times on this blog about the unpredictable nature of spring in Wisconsin. Consistent with this, Memorial Day 2013 was rainy and 50 degrees. The sign at Hoyt Park Pool says it best:

More importantly, Melissa can’t really travel because of her gravid state. So we forwent camping and instead spent the weekend puttering around. On Monday Chris worked on his upcoming grant submissions while Melissa and Everett prepared the house for our new arrivals: the next major step is to move Everett into his new bedroom to make room in the nursery.

Despite the cool weather on Memorial Day it is really starting to feel like summer. Everett is spending much more time outside, and has significantly more dirt under his fingernails and toenails. He is also developing a new level of independence. He has a growing sense of confidence in his navigation skills, and comfort with the idea of venturing further from his parents without direct supervision. Twice during our recent Y-Tribe camping trip he hiked across camp without Chris (who was secretly following him). Since then he has asked if he can walk by himself to other houses on the street such as Joseph’s and Maddie’s or Adam’s and Jacob’s (those of you who are questioning apostrophe use in this sentence are advised to checkout the Apostrophe Protection Society and consider listening to Apostrophe Apostasy in full stereo). When Melissa expressed concern about him venturing out on his own he said “Now remember, Mom.  If you can’t see me, just relax yourself, take a deep breath, and know that I’m still alive.” Another sign of independence is his desire for less supervision when he is with his friends. One day recently Melissa told him he was going to Mary’s house for a couple hours during errands. “Oh, you mean a one Mom play date?!?” It seems that play dates are good, and one Mom play dates are better. We can probably infer that zero Mom play dates would be best.

All of this outside time has cut into roughhousing. In fact, the last time we recall major amounts of roughhousing was during Matt’s & Katie’s wedding weekend with Uncle Boy. Boy is a very experienced roughhouser, which is likely the result of three children and nine grandchildren. Everett must have sensed this and they got into it repeatedly over the weekend. One thing Chris noted from watching them is that Uncle Boy was very good at tiring Everett out without expending a lot of energy himself. They played a game where Boy would cover his eyes with a pillow and try to catch Everett on the couch.

They also played another game called “got that bug!” with a lizard. Not sure exactly how this worked but there was a lot of running involved and a rubber lizard that flew through the air often.

One year at the Sundance Film Festival Chris saw the documentary Ski Bums which was so memorable that he later shared with Melissa. From that movie we learned the term “ground score”, which was used to describe all of the valuable things that are found under chairlifts at ski resorts after the snow melts. The term applies equally well to bicycling. Chris has been finding stuff for years and now Everett has joined in: cell phones, keys, tools, garden implements, workbenches, ladders, etc. In the past week we have found a new baseball, four baseball gloves and a pair of biking gloves. One of the downsides to riding the Bakfiets is that we have room to carry all of this stuff, and therefore we have one less excuse not to pick it up.

On a potentially related subject, we have noted in the past that in Everett’s view the world is filled with treasures that are waiting to be collected. One recent morning during our ride to school we stopped a couple times so that he could put handfuls of rocks, gravel and dirt into the cup holder on his trail-a-bike. Another example: as we started clearing the lawn a few weeks ago, tears were shed because we were putting too many sticks in the yard waste recycling bin. Our neighbor Dennis attempted to help the situation by showing Everett his giant pile of sticks, providing assurance that we are unlikely to run out, at least in the next few months.

During the Y-Tribe camping trip a few weeks ago Everett and Chris hiked the boardwalk across the marsh. Along the way we discovered cattails and experimented with different ways of releasing spores. At the end of the boardwalk we climbed a hill and threw rocks for a while. We found a fallen tree that was decomposing in a curious way into roughly prismatic chunks of wood (and we took some samples home to show Mom).

In that same area we found a 20 foot rope tied to two trees, which we freed and which Everett took everywhere with him for the rest of the weekend.

For the most part this worked out fine except for the 10 minutes that Chris left Everett alone and he came back with rope burns on his neck from riding down the tube run (in his defense, Chris didn’t know this is what Everett was planning, or that the Dads at the tube would let him take the rope along with him (assuming any Dads were present)).

The other Dads watched Everett walking around camp with his rope, sticks and rocks. One of them joked “Don’t you buy him any toys?”, and Chris replied that many people had but he was more interested in outside treasures.

Matt and Katie got married this weekend in Cincinnati.

Our entire family was part of the wedding party: Melissa was a bridesmaid, Chris was a groomsman and Everett was the ring bearer. It was a beautiful event, and an honor for each of us to be a part of the wedding. Matt and Katie both seemed calm, confident and happy throughout the entire weekend. On Monday morning they left for the Caribbean for a couple weeks. Congratulations Matt & Katie!!!

We left Wauwatosa on Wednesday evening around 5pm and made it to Indianapolis before stopping for the night at one of our semi-regular La Quinta locations. We woke on Thursday morning at 6:30am to an actual alarm clock (not Everett) that was set at full volume. Afterward, Chris attempted to walk with Everett to Starbucks, and Everett made it clear what an incredible burden it was to walk that far. Rough start. We arrived at Gabby and Grandaddy’s house later in the morning. Family and friends trickled in, and most of the day Thursday and Friday was spent visiting with people, which for Chris was interspersed with the two grant applications he was working on. Trinity came over Friday morning, which ensured that Everett had almost nonstop entertainment.

On Friday afternoon we went to the church for rehearsal. It’s the first time Chris has been to a Catholic church where the pews had cushions on the seats (when we were kids the pews were made of wood or stone with spikes on the seats). Everett’s job was to carry the ring pillow and walk down the isle with Trinity, who was a junior bridesmaid. He did a good job in his role in the ceremony, but he and Trinity both had a lot of difficulty sitting still otherwise (to be fair, Chris still has a very difficult time sitting still in church). On the way to the rehearsal dinner afterward we (Chris & Melissa) were in the front seat of the car, and Everett was in his carseat in the second row, and we had a talk with him about what constitutes good behavior for a wedding, and how this differs from appropriate behavior in other situations. One nice feature of the new car is that the front passengers and rear passengers can listen to different audio sources. So when we were finished talking to Everett we looked in the back seat and found he was watching a movie with headphones on. Good talk.

For his role as a ring bearer and for his upcoming birthday Everett received several gifts at the rehearsal dinner: a legend of animal tracks, a magnifying glass, a lantern, a compass, binoculars and a bug holder. Soon afterward he announced that he was a paleontologist. He went around the room collecting T-rex eyeballs and teeth from the confetti on each table. He also informed us that one of the bowls on our table was filled with T-rex nose hairs, which sounds much less appetizing than grated Parmesan cheese.

The wedding was on Saturday evening. During the day on Saturday the women got ready at Gabby and Grandaddy’s house while the men went to Mark Auer’s house. Around 3:30 we all met at the Centennial Barn for pictures, and then to the church for the big event. During the rehearsal the photographer had pulled Chris aside and said that some ring bearers freeze halfway up the isle once they realize how many people are watching them, and if that happens that I should be prepared to walk down and help Everett finish. Chris replied that he would be very surprised if this happened, and he was right. Everett and Trinity did a great job – they both appeared calm and confident as they walked down the isle together. Honestly, the biggest problem was that Everett was overheating (it was a very warm day both outside and inside the church) and his wool tuxedo didn’t help.

After the ceremony we returned to the Barn for the reception. Melissa did not tear it up on the dance floor, which certainly goes against her nature. Being seven months pregnant can do that to a woman. In contrast, Everett was a wild man. He showed us his spins and got right into the crowd. He got very upset when Chris left the floor and went upstairs. Fortunately, Chris redeemed himself by bringing back some wedding cake.

During the garter toss Matt shot off a confetti cannon. It turned out that the confetti consisted of strips of paper with the phone numbers of single women who were present during the bouquet toss (not sure how he managed to pull this off). The maid of honor was Becca. Everett danced with her off and on all night, and somehow he found the piece of paper with her number on it and held onto it. At around 11pm he told us that he wanted to go home. Before we could leave he found Becca and said “I’m tired and my feet hurt, but I’ll call you on Monday”. On the way home he asked “Can we invite Becca over for a play date? Or can she watch me sometime?” He also wants to get her a birthday present.

Everett woke up Sunday morning and said “We hit it hard last night, and it hit back!” Next he asked “Do we still have Becca’s phone number?”

Here are some photos from the rehearsal dinner, and here are some of the wedding. As always, these are disproportionately of Everett, with a few of other people mixed in. Anyone who comes to this website knows what they are getting into.