The New Apartment.

Children, we finally made it out of Carbondale. Based on the information from this blog, you may have assumed that our life in Carbondale was boring and mundane. And you'd be absolutely right. Mostly because we're regular people, not rock stars, but partly because if we were rock stars and were snorting cocaine and destroying hotel rooms every night, I wouldn't blog about it for my future children, now would I?

Anyway, we have moved on. Moved up, if you will: up the state. To Chicago. Our new apartment has the kind of classy touches that were nowhere to be found in Carbondale: a built-in cabinet for our linens and books...

walls painted something other than boring white...

and a purpose-made hook for hanging the bananas!

Alas, all this extreme luxury comes at a price: the price of living in Chicago, to put it exactly, which is higher than the price (cost?) of living in Carbondale. We knew this was part of the bargain, but it was never more clear to us than when we realized at the grocery store this weekend the whole-grain tortillas are no longer within our budget.

So this is what's for dinner kids. May the lord have mercy on our blood sugar. Ole!

Everyday Lifer Goes to the Beach!

Children, I skipped last week. Why? Because I was on a beach vacation the likes of which you can only imagine (mostly owing to the fact that you did not yet exist at the time the vacation took place). I know "live tweeting" and "live blogging" are de rigeur at this point in time, but I'll be gosh-darned if I ever adhere to rigid blogging guidelines while on vacation. So here's a full report, with a scandalous, very un-digital-age, one-week delay.

The first night of our beach vacation was pretty much what you'd expect.

Lucia and Marissa shared wine and posed in what they thought were candid, "Everyday Lifer"-friendly positions. Even though I am severely opposed to posing on this blog, I let this incident slide, in honor of the fact that it's a vacation edition.

Then Auntie Kristin documented the events of the day with magic marker in our vacation sketch book, per standard vacation custom. I guess you could call that book the original Everyday Life: Vacation Edition blog.

And finally, your grandmother did her youth-promoting, flab-reducing arm exercises, which consist of holding her arms out at shoulder height between glasses of wine.

Oh, and how could I forget: immediately upon arriving at the beach, we rushed to the store to buy three dozen bananas. Because, you know, we're all pretty much batshit crazy. Sorry about passing that on to you, by the way.