Robert and I are having a baby! Good thing we moved into a house with a yard. I’m 20 weeks along, and due May 2, 2009.

We are beyond thrilled – now that we’re well into the second trimester, we feel really good and have had very positive results from the blood work and ultrasounds, baby looks awesome. I’m starting to feel it move around, which is the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced, and the coolest. I feel pretty good, although I usually have to go to bed by 8:30 PM.

We’re not going to find out if it’s a boy or a girl – we love surprises and suspense. We have 9 nieces and nephews between the two of us – 4 boys and 5 girls, and they are all amazing people, so we would be happy with either kind of kid.

We’re also not telling anyone our name selection because we aren’t interested in a lot of unwanted advice – although we are leaning towards the name Shecky, which works for either a boy or a girl.

It’s official. I’m growing a human. Hooray!

Monday night Chicago was plagued with scary storms, including a series of tornado warnings that even caused the fair city to blare it’s warning tornado sirens.

Out in the western suburbs, we were quietly enjoying some tivo, but keeping one eye turned towards the sky, which was an unnatural, otherworldly color. Suddenly, the tornado warning sirens went off and our adrenaline started surging. TO THE BASEMENT, we shouted, and grabbed what we could as we ran downstairs – computers, i-phones, and for some strange reason, I grabbed Robert’s wallet. In case we needed to buy something down there, I guess.

We discovered we’re woefully unprepared for any type of emergency. The basement is still in a state of disrepair, and the flashlights were no where to be found. No bottled water, no emergency radio, no ponchos, no umbrellas, no first-aid kit, no nothing.

We used our wireless internet on our laptop to track the thunderstorm from the basement.

The first warning we saw on weather.com was for a tornado in our area and possible nickel-sized hail.

About 10 minutes later, after refreshing the page, the warning was changed. No tornado, and the hail size reduced from nickel-sized hail to penny-sized hail.

Robert turns to me, and without missing a beat, says “Recession”.

I couldn’t stop laughing. Luckily, we didn’t get hit by a tornado, and the Mini didn’t get hit by either nickel- or penny-sized hail. We lost our cable but not our power, but all of our neighbors across the street were without power for a day. I’m glad we weren’t swept away by any tornado or pelted with any type of money-sized hail.

We’re VERY new to the neighbor stuff. We don’t know a lot of people here, and are unsure of how the whole having-neighbors-thing works. We’re used to living in the city, where you ignore everyone and pretend that they don’t exist. In the suburbs, it’s not like that. People are nice. They say hello.  They look out their windows to see what you are up to. And now, we look out of OUR windows to see what THEY are up to.

Before a recent trip, we decided to leave a note for our neighbor with a request to please call us if the house burned down, or got hit by a tornado, or squashed by the foot of Godzilla.

I left a friendly note in their mailbox, and right before we left, saw our neighbor out on his front step.

“Hey there,” I said “I left a note in your mailbox. We’re going out of town for a few days, would you mind keeping an eye on our house for us?”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on that house for 20 years” he said.

I didn’t really know how to take that.

Robert and I went to the gas station in our little town the other night, on our way home from work. We were surprised by the sign on the gas station pump:

Who knew you could get a corn dog, filled with corn doggy goodness, for only 49 cents? I wonder if you can get something else filled with corn doggy goodness? Like a donut? Or maybe a gallon of gas?

And although we love a good corn dog (especially from a state fair), we did not partake of the 49 cent corn doggy goodness-filled corn dog. Too cheap. I like my corn dogs to cost more than a dollar.

Ok – the holiday competition for decorations has officially begun in our neighborhood.

Our neighbors have a huge inflatable snowman, along with a happy inflatable santa riding a motorcycle, and a lot of pretty holiday lights around the eaves and doorway of their house. And it’s not even December 1 yet!

I wish we had power outdoors, ’cause we would totally win the imaginary competition if we did.

Over the Thanskgiving holiday, we reflected on a couple more reasons of why we love living in the suburbs.

So, here’s part two of our list.

1. The Top Ten Library! I go to the library at least every two weeks, and come home with a stack of books. I love it, especially because now it’s winter, perfect reading time.

2. Living close to the grocery store. While making pies before the thanksgiving holiday, we realized we were out of lemons, (for the apple pie) and it was just a quick trip to get more.

3. It’s a shorter drive to relatives houses, by us living 30 minutes outside of the city instead of in the heart of the loop-de-loop.

4. Not one, but TWO IKEAS within a short driving distance.

5. Competing with the neighbors on who has the best holiday decorations. Game on, man – it’s our first year and we’re doing it up big.

6. Squirrels. Really, we love the squirrels. We’re a little worried about how they will stay warm during the cold Chicago winter, but they seem to have it worked out by getting fat and storing nuts.

We’re happy with this first thanksgiving in our new house (even though we weren’t here). It will be exciting to have the upcoming holidays here!

Here’s some reasons why we are happy with our decision to move to the suburbs of Chicago after over 10 years of living in the city, three of those years in the West Loop. It was a controversial decision, especially among our friends who are long-time city dwellers, but one we didn’t make lightly.

Here’s why we love our little house in the suburbs:

1. It’s quiet.
2. There’s no traffic.
3. There are animals in our yard that we watch daily. We even love the squirrels, although everyone hates them.
4. We have trees with leaves and green grass instead of cold concrete and steel.
5. The amount of money we spent on our four-bedroom house with a yard, basement and garage would have gotten us a one-bedroom condo maybe with a parking space, (if we were super lucky) in the city. So, economical!
6. Any kind of shopping we need to do, it’s available and closeby, and we don’t pay for parking.
7. That’s a big one – not paying for parking. When I worked in the gold coast, I was paying $24/day for parking. (and there was no public transportation available from where I was living that wouldn’t have taken two hours).
8. We can go to the movies and not pay for parking (See, I told you it was big)
9. We’ve never lived in the suburbs, it’s new and different.
10. Neighbors – never ever talked to our neighbors in the city. We felt inferior because we were renters. Now we have funny neighbor stories almost weekly!
11. We can do whatever we want to our house without a bossy landlord to tell us no, you can’t paint the walls.
12. No elephant-footed upstairs neighbors, or loud, stereo-with-God-awful-music playing.
13. No people “holding” parking spaces on the street with lawn chairs and sawhorses after it snows.
14. Now our formerly-wasted rent money is going towards our mortgaged future, instead of down the toilet each month.
15. Squirrels are better than pigeons.

All good, important reasons, I think.

Here’s the smoking gun evidence that our entire yard and driveway was covered with leaves. Robert worked hard filling 14, yes FOURTEEN yard waste bags full of these leaves. And sadly, our trash day is on Thanksgiving, so the leaves will have to wait another week until they get tossed. Good thing we don’t use our garage for car storage!

Wonder what would have happened if we just left the leaves in the yard for the winter? Besides making our neighbors angry, I mean.

Today was the first official day of raking leaves in the new house. Yesterday, in one day it seems, all the leaves from our front two maple trees fell off, finally. The leaves were almost up to our knees, they were so thick. The driveway was completely covered with leaves.

This morning, Robert and I raked leaves and shoved them into lawn bags. We filled up 7 lawn bags (a town rule that you have to put them in the yard waste bags – no leaf burning allowed here) and we still have 5 piles of leaves to load up – but we ran out of the bags, sadly. Our neighbor took a shortcut and just mowed his leaves instead of raking them. But we did it the old-fashioned way, rocked it old-school with rakes.

It’s cold enough now for mittens outside.

On Halloween, several of the neighbors avoided trick-or-treating at our house. We watched them go to the house on the left, and on the right, and the house across the street, but not to our cute, decorated house. We created this whole scenario in our minds of why they went to every house but ours – like we were being shunned by the neighborhood because of some offense. We’re very new to the whole neighbor thing – we aren’t very good at it, really.

We thought:
-they were mad about the tree-trimming at 7:30 AM
-they hated us because we are democrats
-they somehow found this blog and decided we sucked

But I’m happy to report that the shunning was all in our minds. Completely fabricated. The neighbors came over the other night while walking their new puppy and talked to us for a while. It was nice, pleasant even. They were friendly and kind and not judgemental.

So we’re working on not jumping to neighbor conclusions anymore.