My dad ran his 42nd marathon earlier this month: the Lakefront Marathon here in MKE. It's always the same weekend as the Twin Cities Marathon and the Chicago Marathon, so those crazy midwestern runaholics have their pick of locales. But we were glad he chose our town and we could get an extra visit out of it.
Pop Pop came in on Saturday (Grandma Heidi stayed home sick) and we headed downtown to pick up his race packet. The pick up was in the Kern Center, which will forever be known in our house as the "athletic facility promised to Matt by his sophomore year at MSOE but wasn't actually built until two years after he graduated". Then it was off to dinner. My dad was staying at a hotel downtown that night to catch the 6 a.m. shuttle to the start of the race, so I tried to think of somewhere downtown which was kid-friendly and only came up with one place: Buca's. Imagine the groans when we pulled up and saw a line of homecoming kids pouring out the doors.
Craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap. We ended up at The Knick which is a restaurant Matt and I used to go to all the time when we were young, hip, and most of all, childless. It was not ideal for two kids. Not even a little bit. I wasn't even sure they would have a high chair. I could feel the hairy eyeballs from other diners as we walked in and I said a little prayer to the gods of chicken nuggets that G and L would behave. We got bread and crackers right away to munch on and G entertained herself by putting her napkin around her waist and playing waitress. There was an older, very well dressed woman sitting near us and I could see her watching us. As she was leaving she approached the table. I got all ready for a verbal smack down about interrupting her evening, but instead she said, "I just want to tell you, your children are so well behaved. I just really enjoyed watching them from my table." I almost collapsed, I was so proud and relieved.
Pride aside, by the time dinner was done we were on serious borrowed time with Luke. So we hauled a$$ out of there and dropped Pop Pop back off at his hotel with a promise to meet up the next day for the race!
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| lukie getting ready for his first marathon. look alike much? |
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| g is running her race in this pic. look at that form! | | |
Race day came and it was seriously chilly. We headed back to the East Side to meet up with Pop Pop at the corner of Capital and Lake. I realized that we've never really taken the kids to hang out at the lakefront which made me promise myself we will do that next year. Anyway I used my fancy Big Brother tracker to figure out where dad was via Facebook and sure enough after about 15 minutes we saw the red shirt bobbing our way.
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| taking in the view while waiting |
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| lakefront ladies |
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| i was sleeping warm and sound in the car...and you woke me up for this? |
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| gg racing (again) |
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| poor lukie was not amused |
After we caught up on Capital we drove down to Veteran's Park to the finish line. We passed Pop Pop on our way and I rolled down the window so G could drive-by-cheer. We had to park in a ramp and by the time we got in the ramp, unloaded the small people, and finally got to the finish line, I knew we had missed him. It was a total gong show down there and the location of the actual finish line wasn't that intuitive so we walked around for quite a while before figuring out what was where. Oh well. I finally managed to track dad down just in time to capture this magical moment that could only happen in Milwaukee:
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| boom. it's miller time. |
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| trying to get her to take a picture with us. cute. |
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| i don't remember what we bribed her with but obviously it worked |
Once home dad took a long hot shower and was somehow basically back to normal. Meanwhile Matt had to fly out that evening to a conference so it was dinner a la Martins and early to bed for most of 'em. The next morning dad and I took the kids to breakfast and then he hit the road back to Roch. Despite the chill it was a fun weekend. And who knows? Pop Pop may have inspired a future generation of distance runner:
