July, Part I

All right!  Let's dissect some more missing time...  Here is what I have from the first 18 days of July...

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FB - July 2 at 7:35pm: Ava walked! It was totally legit, too! She was holding onto the coffee table, turned toward me, let go and stood there, then took 3 steps over to me! :D - YAY!  It was AWESOME!  It took her a WHILE before she was steady, but now she's running around and I can barely keep up with her!

FB -  July 6 at 3:51pm: Ava's new trick: Blowing raspberries. Favorite time to do this: Mealtime. .... :P - Oh, THAT was fun!  Fortunately, she only did that for about 3 days.... but blowing raspberries has a completely different affect when you have food in your mouth... :P


Photo - July 10 at 10:54pm: Random picture of Josie.

FB - July 11 at 4:42pm: The downside to having a baby who sleeps 10.5 hrs at night: nap time is nearly nonexistent... - Oh, boy, Sara... you have no idea!

FB - July 11 at 11:38pm: FRIENDS WITH KIDS: How do you transition a kid from nursing/baby food to cow's milk/table food? Ava is nearly a year old now, and I'm wondering how this is supposed to work. I can't imagine you should just go, "BAM! No more of anything you're used to! Here's some whole milk and a sandwich! Good luck, considering you still only have 2 teeth!" Thoughts/ideas? What's worked for you? - I got a lot of great advice, and Ava did just fine with the transition.  She doesn't eat NEARLY enough grains, so I'm working on that.. But she's got 8 teeth now, and she's learning how to use them!  She LOVES fruit!  She'd eat nothing but fruit all day long if I let her!

Photo - July 12 at 10:14am: Ava at story time at the library!  The lady who runs story time (in the cropped pants there) blows bubbles for the kids at the end of each session, and Ava LOVES it!  She always ends up with dried bubble soap in her hair, but that's fine!

FB - Suzi Grant - July 12 at 3:10pm:  Holy 8 years of being married, Batman!! I can't believe it's been that long. Hope y'all are enjoying the ride! Talk to you soon. Can we do math? O:) - Jason and I celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary this year!  And I use the word "celebrated" VERY loosely!  I think I saw him for 20 minutes that day.  I'm trying to remember if we even celebrated later... I think we might have gotten Chinese or something.  *shrugs*  We'll do something nice for our 10-year. 


Photo - July 13 at 5:22pm: Random picture of Lucy.  Sometimes when we go on walks, she gets tired and just lays down... *eye roll*

Photo - July 13 at 7:58pm: Ava says, "Mamamamama... is it bath time?"

Photos - July 14 at 9:40pm: So, for about 3 months, we didn't have access to our little storage room attached to the building.  The people who lived here before us (who are related to the owners) still had their stuff in there.  So we had a bunch of broken-down boxes stacked against the wall in Ava's room..  Mr. Kiggerz was having fun with them, but then Ava came over to "get" him...  So he escaped and perched juuuust high enough that she couldn't reach.  Butt head... ;)

FB - July 15 at 12:54am: Am I the only one who feels like they can TOTALLY wait to see Harry Potter when it comes to redbox? I've been over it since before book 7 came out... -  Ha!  I was kinda surprised I didn't get lynched when I posted this!  I dunno...  I'm just so OVER Harry Potter... I wonder when it's coming to redbox though.  I wouldn't MIND seeing it.  And in my defense, I haven't been to the movies in MONTHS.  I didn't even get to go see The Help!  I AM going to go see Breaking Dawn, part 1 though.  It comes out ON my birthday, and I'm getting a sitter.  And I might go eat Chinese buffet by myself while I'm at it.  Yummmmmmmmmm....

FB - July 16 at 8:42pm: For dinner, we're doing grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup Mexican style: cheese quesadillas and black bean soup (which has a can of tomatoes in it). I used dried black beans, which I soaked and cooked earlier today.... First time using dry beans.... Wish us luck! - YUM!  So I have a ton of bags of dried beans, but I've never cooked with them before, so this was an experiment.  The soup turned out really yummy!I've made it once since then, too.  The cheese quesadillas go GREAT with it, too!  If you're interested in making the soup, HERE is the recipe.  I couldn't find veggie stock, so I used chicken stock, but the original recipe is vegetarian.  I subbed half a bag of dried black beans for the 2 cans.  A bag of beans really only makes about 3.5 cans of beans, but since it's a soup, exact measurements aren't so important... and I wanted to be able to make it twice!


Photo - July 18 at 9:55pm:  The beginning of Ava's climbing phase.  It's getting worse and worse and worse the older she gets...  (Jason is JUST outside the picture to the left, in case you're wondering... or worried....) The color on this picture is TERRIBLE.  I don't even know which onesie she's wearing, because she doesn't have one THAT color!  And that's Jason's iPhone 4!  Just saying... My phone's camera may have worse resolution, but at least the color is okay!

Anyway, I'm not sure what all this tells you... That we're boring and don't really do anything?  Probably.  The bubbles are a highlight of MY week, too... ;)

Upside-Down Pizza

So, before Jason had to start work, we had to try this so-called "deep-dish" pizza that Chicago is known for.  I did a bit of research and found that there were two big popular franchises: Gino's East and Giordano's.  I checked both of their websites, and found that there were a couple Giordano's pretty close to where we live, so that was the plan.

So we get in the car and I'm setting up the Garmin... I search for pizza places, and what should pop up, but a Gino's East location closer to the Giordano's we were going to go to!  Sweet!

So we're driving, driving, driving on roads we've never been on.  Yeah, it wasn't that bad.  I mean, we had a GPS telling us where to go, and we're way out in the suburbs... It's not like it was downtown Chicago traffic or even interstate traffic headed toward Chicago (which is a lot more intimidating than it sounds)!  We turn into the shopping center that Gino's is in, and circle around the parking lot about 5 times looking for this place.

Yeah, as it turns out, you should trust a the company's website over a Garmin.  Apparently you have to pay money to get the info on those things updated!  How rude!  (My in-laws gave it to us just before we drove to Illinois, so I knew pretty much zip about the thing.)  So we gave up, and kept going toward Giordano's.  And I have to say, I'm glad we did.  I still haven't been to Gino's East, but Giordano's was yummy!

When we got there, and were happy to see they had lunch specials! Only $6.00 for a personal deep-dish pizza (they're QUITE expensive, in case you didn't click the links and look at the menus).  I think a drink came with it, too (I can't tell if that's Sprite or water)... But more importantly, we got to pick our own kind of pizza.  Jason ordered sausage and I ordered the spinach (which Jason hates)!  YUMMM!

Deep dish pizza takes a while to cook, so while we waited, Jason had some "fun" with Ava...

She agrees with everyone else in the world.  Lemons are sour.  This is the only picture I have of her making a face.  I think she might have liked it.  Are babies' taste buds completely developed at 10 months?

After that, we fed Ava actual food we'd brought for her... Some jar or something or other, I'm sure.  After a while, they brought our pizza out.

This is the face Jason makes when his food looks suspicious: in this case, when he sees tomato chunks right on top.  After 8 years, I still can't believe I married a guy who doesn't like tomatoes...  After picking them off, there wasn't much sauce left.  That didn't make him very happy.  But Ava loved the tomato chunks.  (That's my baby!)

I thought it was delicious!  And I was fascinated by the upside-down-ness of it all!

As you can see, the crust itself is actually very thin and crispy.  They put the "toppings" on first (my fresh spinach), then a THICK layer of cheese, then the sauce on top.  Funny, huh?  It was GREAT.  I had no problem downing the whole thing.  If I remember correctly, Jason had leftovers, and I think he let me eat them, as he wasn't terribly impressed.

Since then, we've also been to Lou Malnati's, which has a location just down the street from us.  It was good, but I didn't like their crust as well.  Plus, they are take-out only... which would have been great to know BEFORE we went there to get food.  Oops.  But that gave us an excuse to go check out this Walmart-like store they have up here called Meijer ("meyer").  It's better than Walmart, but carries the same very large variety of products.  I really should shop there more often, but Walmart is SO CLOSE to my house....

Anyway, like I said before, deep-dish pizza is really expensive, so we've only had it 3-4 times.  (We also tried a local thin-crust pizza, but that definitely wasn't as good AND it was crazy expensive.  I was shocked.)  So in an effort to save money, I've made deep-dish pizza twice.  The first time was bad.  It tasted fine, but trying to get the crust to work was really really really really really really really (etc.) difficult.  It worked better the second time.  What I learned: don't try to roll out the crust, just press it around the pan.

HERE is the recipe I used, from allrecipes.com:

Mine did NOT look this good (looks like they've added a bunch of stuff), but it was yummy!  I left out the fennel seed, because it's gross and the Italian sausage up here doesn't have any in it that I've seen!

So whether you've had authentic Chicago deep-dish pizza or not, this is a great way to change up pizza night!