Week 5: Miles turns 19, trims beard

I had intended to post about Miles’s birthday during the week, but this week ended up being very busy for John and I from a work point of view, and also fairly time-consuming in terms of regular household stuff like cooking, so that didn’t happen. But looking back, the birthday was one of the more exciting things to happen, so it’s good to have it to report on now!

I found this octopus mural while out on a walk earlier in the weekend and decided what better gift than to bring Miles to see it on his birthday.

Here’s Miles and Ashton, enjoying the new site. And Miles probably wondering if any other celebrations were planned…

Miles had some plans himself – he made us latkes or potato pancakes that were really nice for brunch!

Which we enjoyed outside. This is the time of year when we are very excited about any nice enough weather that allows us to be in the back yard, but the garden itself doesn’t look great in photos.

Nyx enjoyed the back door being open and getting a little screen door climbing time in!

Back to the octopus mural, we took the scenic route back from the first octopus mural, and then saw a second one – in the window of a restaurant that we really like, Heritage. Meanwhile we were struggling to find a restaurant that was open for takeout on Easter and didn’t require ordering in advance (we had kinda been burned by a few places that we thought were open but were not…) Well, turns out Heritage had a family meal for 4 left so we snapped it up!

The family meal was roast lamb and parsnips and carrots, a cheesy couscous, and parker rolls. Ashton made a really delicious lemon cream cake, which got the happy birthday song treatment for Miles.

In addition to being shown an octopus mural, Miles got a pair of Birkenstocks as a gift.

After the fun of Sunday, it was a pretty long slog to Friday, to be honest. April in Chicago can be pretty cruel – we woke up to the white stuff twice!

Nyx participated in my work from home busy week, and tutored Miles a bit.

But Saturday was bright and “warm” – up to almost 50F / 10C. John and I went for morning runs and afternoon walks to try to salvage the terrible direction our steps went this week due to long work hours and uninspiring weather!

Readers might notice how fast we are going! And far! John went a few times during the week without me and he seems to have picked up the pace, then out of peer pressure or whatever I guess I can keep up! Watch out organized 5Ks whenever they open up, we are now highly competitive in our age group! Actually I’m not sure that’s even true, but we are faster than we used to be.

The leaves aren’t out on the tree but it was very sunny today so we got out the umbrella.

Miles trimmed off a lot of beard yesterday – this is his new summer beard look! Beneath the tarp is a lot of firewood – our friend Chris came by yesterday and stood 6′ away from his truck while Miles and Ashton unloaded some extra firewood for our firepit. Thanks, Chris!

And here are some sights and sounds videos. The bird sounds were lovely as we ate breakfast outside this morning: watch and more importantly listen here.

And on our afternoon walk, we went past Norwegian American Hospital and saw this lovely thank you parade for the hospital staff. While us (read: this) non-emergency workers might be feeling a bit weary of the isolation, that’s nothing compared to what people in the health, emergency and essential work sector are doing for us all right now. To everyone who is getting us through this situation, beep beep and THANK YOU!!!