\n<\/span><\/strong>My cousin\u2019s getting married in Chicago.\u00a0 Game on.<\/em><\/p>\n
We left the hotel before most of the revelers were awake \u2013 Number One Son being inclined to rise at 0630, time zones notwithstanding.\u00a0 \u201cHey, Dad, come look at the sunrise!\u201d\u00a0 Oh god.\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Sunrise.\u00a0 OK.\u00a0 So, packed and out in short order.\u00a0 We saw some more cousins on the way out \u2013 also very early risers, which is another term for \u201cparents of young children.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Speaking of young children, the imperative in the morning is to get food into Number One Son, so that he can have his medicine, which has been proven to dramatically increase the lifespan of children with his conditions, especially when driving long distances with them in the car.\u00a0 So, we turned on SOBUMD\u2019s magic iPhone, now with the God App divinely installed, fired up Bitchin\u2019 Betty, and found us some grub.\u00a0 There being no handy Waffle House, we turned to a local version \u2013 Elly\u2019s Pancake House<\/a>, in Arlington Heights.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a pic of part of the menu:\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Elly's Pancake House. It's THAT good.<\/p><\/div>\n Oh my god.\u00a0 This place is everything Dan\u2019s Family Restaurant wants to be when it grows up.\u00a0 They had coffee on the table within 30 seconds of seating us \u2013 and I was NOT wearing a visible sidearm, I might add.\u00a0 The food was incredible and enormous and reasonably priced.\u00a0 Elly\u2019s Pancake House.\u00a0 There are three of them, and if the others are as good as this one, I\u2019ll have to try them all.\u00a0 Yum!<\/p>\n Once fed and medicated, we pressed on toward Bowling Green, Ohio.\u00a0 Explaining why we were headed to Bowling Green requires some history.<\/p>\n Where to begin?\u00a0 In the early \u201870s, DARPA and ARPA became the internet, small \u201ci”, and then in the \u201880s Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML, which spawned the World Wide Web on the Internet, big \u201cI\u201d, and then we got to the crazy Dot-Com days of 1999, where some crazy people thought that they could make money by creating a message\/chat board for women who were all going to have babies in any given month talk to each other about how it was going.\u00a0 They couldn\u2019t really make any money that way, but that wouldn\u2019t become apparent for several years.\u00a0 The point is that there were a bunch of women who were, in fact, interested in such a board, and the upshot of this is that there are I think 80 or so women who are still<\/strong> talking about how it\u2019s going.\u00a0 \u00a0Just as PBS and Sesame Street were the great promise of television in the \u201860s, this kind of community building \u2013 crossing boundaries of race, income, location, education, orientation, everything \u2013 is the great promise of the Internet, and it\u2019s been fascinating to me to watch this community of interest become self-sustaining.\u00a0<\/p>\n When the original hosting company realized this was not a money-making venture after all, these women packed up en masse<\/em> and bootlegged the board onto their own systems until they found something else to work with.\u00a0 It is now its own self-sustaining, self-policing community, and I\u2019ve been delighted to be privileged to meet some of the members \u2013 pretty much the only things they all have in common are English and babies.\u00a0 The original babies are around 10 years old now \u2013 most were born in June or July of 2000; in our case, Number One Son.\u00a0 (Number<\/a> One Son has 100 mommies, and I only get to sleep with one of them.\u00a0 Hardly seems fair.)\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t really know that he has a hundred mommies, but I do \u2013 I\u2019m convinced that The Board, as we call it, is responsible for saving his life at least once.\u00a0 Possibly mine also. \u00a0Many of the ladies of The Board have also contributed questions to the Friday ManFAQ<\/a>, for which they have my undying gratitude – and the thanks of a grateful nation.\u00a0<\/p>\n So, short story long, one of the Board ladies lives in Bowling Green, and another lives within 90 minutes drive of there, and we were heading to Bowling Green to meet them for dinner.\u00a0 (It says something about the Board that one of them was willing to drive her whole family an hour and a half up and another hour and a half back, to meet us at Bob Evans.\u00a0 That\u2019s love, baby.)<\/p>\n Driving there had its moments.\u00a0 Just before we crossed the state line, there was a great billboard:\u00a0 \u201cIndiana Coffee and Chocolate Company \u2013 To Dull the Pain of Ohio.\u201d\u00a0 Only in the Great Plains do the actual states gang up and insult each other.\u00a0 You won\u2019t hear Virginia messing with North Carolina, believe me. \u00a0On the other hand, the clouds through most of Ohio looked like tanks, all the same shape and lined up for battle.\u00a0 Maybe they take that kind of thing seriously.\u00a0<\/p>\n The other great part of that drive was explaining to Number One Son (and his sisters) who we were going meet and exhorting him to behave.\u00a0 We had explained the bribe before we left home:\u00a0 behave very well this whole trip and you\u2019ll get the Iron Man 2 DVD you want when we get home.\u00a0 Driving to Bowling Green, he asks \u201cMaybe some other time we could come to Chicago under, you know, better circumstances?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBetter circumst \u2013 What?\u00a0 What could be better than a wedding?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, when I don\u2019t have a movie riding on it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Responsibility.\u00a0 Ain\u2019t it a bitch.<\/p>\n![\"Elly's](\"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/pancakehouse1.jpg\" "\\"Pancake")
![\"Kirsty](\"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/KirstyRocksHat.jpg\" "\\"Kirsty")
![\"moreboardpeople\"](\"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/moreboardpeople.jpg\" "\\"moreboardpeople\\"")
![\"Board](\"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/good-shot-of-kids.jpg\" "\\"Board")