Ernie Meets the Springfield Crew

Ernie got to experience one of the amazing mornings that Springfield, IL is known for. Every single day the sun comes up there. Amazing.

Sleeping with my baby in my old room was a surreal experience.

We planned an Ernesto meet-and-greet for Springfield friends and family at Rotary Park. I was a bit stressed leading up to this event. I didn't know if anyone would show up, but it turned out just about everyone I know in town showed up. That was nice. I was also concerned that everyone would want to hold him and we were a bit freaked out about germs. He hasn't had contact with that many people and we were concerned about him touching 400 dirty hands plus sitting on the dirty planes breathing in St. Louis farts for 10 hours. We left him in his car seat most of the time to discourage too much handling of him and that seemed to work pretty well.

My mom was really cute because as soon as we got Ernie loaded into the stroller she grabbed it and pushed it over to everyone, like she wanted to show him off.

I have a big family which is nice but I always feel a bit guilty because that means I have about 4 minutes to speak to each person.

I brought Lydia to the home of authentic central Illinois cuisine: Steak 'n Shake. They even had horseshoes advertised on the menu which I was excited about. I didn't order one but I was excited that they were there.

We did some night time strolling around downtown Springfield and took in some sights. There was a historical marker noting that Obama gave his presidential candidacy speech at the Old State Capitol. Historical markers about events that I personally attended makes me feel pretty old, actually.

One of the presents that was in Ern's pile today was this scrunchy book that he likes to kick a whole lot.

Anniversary Party at the Sangamo

My Uncle Ed and Aunt Anne celebrated their 50th anniversary so we graced Springfield with our presence.

I was kind of excited because the venue was the Sangamo Club. I had heard the place was fancy and I had never been there before.

A weird thing happened. When I entered the club I realized that this place had sounded fancy to Springfield me. Present day me has had a busy decade. I had a $150 lunch in the Burj Khalifa. This was sort of an uncomfortable moment. I felt guilty for being underwhelmed, and I felt like my own maturation had lead to some loss of magic like realizing there's no Santa. I still had fun, don't get me wrong, and it was great to see the family.

Speaking of which my cousin Bridget's kid was in attendance. I want to say he said his name was Cutie McChubberson.

A decent portion of the night was spent seeing how long he would tolerate us holding him.

Baby bench-pressing meant I had less time to talk to my other family members. There are just so many of them I pretty much only have time to have a real conversation with any one of them about once every 20 years or so.

So there was food at the party so I'm not sure why the heck we ended up at friggin Steak 'n Shake. There was an open bar and I was pretty open about ordering from it so that could have had some bearing on my decision. I was pretty excited to see that they had realized they had all the ingredients on hand to make horseshoes all along. Quite an Illinois traditional discovery indeed.

I may have asked for some of those paper hats for us to wear. Yeah there was definitely some alcohol related decision making taking place here.

I may have also made friends with the guy in the drive up window. These are my people, what can I say?

Ladies, get you a dude who will steal you flowers from a family party and a paper hat.