Alex Rocks!

Uncle Nick's band had a big gig Saturday night, so we had to rest up for Alex's first rock concert. As you can see, Murphy is no longer respecting Alex's boundaries and thinks nothing of jumping right on top of him and making himself comfortable. Alex doesn't seem to mind that Murph is in his "bubble", so I think this is just another indication that the two of them are destined to be best buds.

Nick's band - aka Nickalogic Groove Project - was headlining at the Tower Park Music Festival in Peoria Heights at eight-thirty. Alex had demonstrated quite an affinity for the great outdoors - and he loves his Uncle Nick's music - so we thought it was about time that he experience his first live show. They were to perform onstage under a big open air gazebo, so we weren't overly worried about him getting the cooties. Which is a good thing, because there were ten zillion people there (some surely infected with the cooties), and most of them knew Nick and/or my parents. In fact, most of them knew Tim and I, and it seemed that all of them knew who Alex was. Not that we knew who they were. But we did run into one familiar face - our family friend Michelle who used to babysit me when I was a newborn. She had her little guy Ethan and I had my little guy Alex, so it was a really fun coincidence that the two of us were able to share stories about our new babies when she used to change my diaper.

Aside from Michelle, at least a dozen strangers came up to us and blurted, "Is this the grandbaby??!! Apparently Grandma and Grandpa B must've taken out an ad to declare that their grandbaby would be the opening act for Nickalogic Groove Project, thus everyone was eagerly anticipating Alex's appearance.

We were about thirty-ish feet from the stage and Nick's music is not exactly of the "easy listening" variety, so I was a little concerned a) about damaging his poor little eardrums, and b) that the volume would upset him and cause him to scream his lungs out the entire time we were there. However, the boy surprised us all. I don't know whether he was entranced by the music, soothed by the lovely weather we had that night, or whether the first loud blast from the speakers rendered him deaf so that the rest of the concert didn't phase him, but he slept like a log from the time the show started to when it ended at ten-thirty. In fact, he slept the whole way home and didn't wake up until we pried him from his carrier. At that point, we decided that we needed to hire Nick's band to play nightly shows in Alex's room between the hours of twelve and six so that Tim and I (and Alex!) could actually get a decent night's sleep.

We did score some backstage passes and Alex and Timothy got their pictures taken with the band, including drummer Courtez, "Funky" Brian the bassist, and singer/guitarist (Uncle) Nick.

Alex really wanted to join the band as a roadie-in-training with hopes of futhering his own musical career, but we had to put our foot down. At three and a half weeks, we just don't think he is quite ready for a life on the road...