Nails for the ladies

Girls in Chicago. We landed today at O'Hare and Vanessa picked us up. All set for a week of Thanksgiving in Chicago. Home of the Field Museum, the Bears, Mike Ditka, Ditka's Restaurant, The Apple Store, American Girl Place, Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donohue, Navy Pier, The Berghoff (?), Millennium Park, and Barack Obama.

Excellent dinner tonight reconnecting with Nessa and Paul -- painting toenails, being crazy. Tomorrow we go downtown for the city delights.

Boy lost his tooth!

Momentous occasion tonight! All day, Nigel has been on the verge of losing his first tooth. It's been bugging him that it won't come out, but he hasn't wanted to yank it, and we're cool with letting him wait. But tonight, Elissa was getting him ready for bed and they tried one more time with a tissue, and out it came. So he's quite happy, and heading to bed in anticipation of the tooth fairy.

Man. Not a baby any more.

Proud cabinet builder

Nigel and I spent a couple of hours at my office today, Saturday, while Lily and Elissa were at Lily's Nutcracker rehearsal. It was cold and frosty outside in Salem today, so we turned on the lights and the radio, and we put together the new cabinet. He's pretty good at lining up the holes for the pegs. He's also quite strong. He unboxed two chairs (one of them pictured at right) and screwed the legs on them while I fussed with (and cursed under my breath at) the glass door hinges. It's a pretty good cabinet, though, and now I have a place to put my junk that has been lying around on my office floor for the last couple of months.

See how proud he is. If you look closely, you can see the ruby-encrusted pirate ring the scoundrel sports on his hard-working finger. He likes to show off a little booty.