Good Times

Bryn and I spent two days in Chicago and had a fabulous time! It was so fun for us to get away and have some "girl time"...that is definitely something that gets shoved to the back burner to often by the daily grind.

We got to Chicago on Saturday afternoon and hit the ground running. We rented the car, headed to out hotel and went to check out the Lego store. Bryn was very impressed by the huge Lego spider right outside the store. We went back to American Girl and met Valerie Tripp - the author of many of the American Girl books. She signed one of Bryn's books and spent some time answering Bryn's questions like "which comes first - the books or the dolls?" (the books, BTW!). And "how long does it take to write a book?". We took a cab over to Navy Pier, rode the Ferris wheel, had some hot chocolate and did some fun mother-daughter activities from a book we got. We went back to the American Girl store and had "dinner with the author" - a fun dinner and Q&A set up by the store. We walked the block back to the hotel, played some double solitaire and finally called it a night!

On Sunday morning we got up and head to the Shedd Aquarium and saw their new show, "Fantasea", which Bryn says was the highlight of the trip. It was opening weekend for the show and some of the animals didn't cooperate but it was great anyway. We went at the perfect time of day - the crowds were pouring in just as we were leaving to meet my friends, Dustin and Wes, for lunch.

We had a nice time with Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa talked quite a bit and ate like a horse! He did point out the creases on Grandma's forehead (which she didn't appreciate much!) and got a little sarcastic about the fact that I wasn't wearing shoes, but it was actually great to see him so engaged and responsive. There were some concerns about his blood pressure and overall health, but a trip to the ER after we left on Monday morning revealed that all is well.

The homefront stayed intact while we were gone. I came home to a little man with a cold and a couch covered in snot, but he is still in pretty good spirits. It was great to have Jim and Sherry here until this morning as I seem to have so much to catch up on and not enough time to get it done. We had parent-teacher conferences tonight (that is a whole other post as I need to have little time to mull that rant over!) and I had to hand out cookie forms at Girl Scouts tonight. Bring on the Thin Mints!

The next few days are going to be super busy - I have decided that if I am going to get out of this endless loop of too much to do, too little time" I have to stop some of these activities. It is time.

A nice little bonus...after two years of not being able to figure out how to turn the closed captioning on on the TV, I accidentally stumbled on to the secret last night. Now I can hear the show with bad audio without turning the TV up loud enough to wake the kids!