Chicago Part Two, Day 9

July 6

Keeping up this blog has been a challenge.  It's really busy around here!  However, after accumulating a bunch of pictures and memories, I thought I should try better to get stuff onto my blog.  I hate to not document things.

Back to our cross country trip...  I shouldn't be too worried, Joe has made a beautiful video of our trip and we have that!

I believe this would be day 9 in Chicago.  After a full day at Millennium Park and Downtown we added another full day in Chicago.  We wanted to go to Lincoln Park Zoo (free!) and then hit the beach which was right near the zoo.  I have to admit it sounds a bit weird to mention the beach in Chicago.

We went to a lot zoos on this trip.  I really enjoyed this one.  The zoo being situated so beautifully in the middle of the city made it so enjoyable.  Not to mention - free, made it great too.  The weather was perfect!

Another great shot of Chicago's skyline.  I took a lot of pictures with my iPhone.  In fact, I've ignored my camera lately.  My phone is so much easier to take pictures of moments as they occur.  I miss my big clunky camera.  I shall dust it off and use it more often.

After the zoo, we had walked into the city and had lunch at McDonalds.  We also had to make a stop at a local Walgreens to pick up some beach towels!  In the McDonalds, I spotted one of these.

I just stared at it and thought how unused those payphones must be!  It almost seemed to be a thing of the past and it registered useless in my head.  However, there it was!  I didn't even check if it still took a quarter to make a call.  Funny, I just saw a payphone the other day and we had a similar conversation upon finding it and then we noticed that the phone handle had been ripped off.  It was no longer a working payphone.  Off to the beach.

We packed our bags that morning to spend a few hours at the beach after the zoo.  I didn't know what to expect, but once we got there it looked just like an ocean view except it was Lake Michigan.  The beach was crowded.  We placed our stroller and towels way in the back and set up.  I didn't even bring my swimsuit.  I just laid back with Max and enjoyed the beautiful weather.  Everything felt like any other beach but I would say the an ocean breeze might have been the one thing I noticed different.

Eventually, Max fell asleep and I put him in his stroller under the shade.  I laid back and tried to relax while I watched my kids go back and forth between the very crowded beach hoping they would find their way back and forth and not get lost.  I didn't even visit the water till the very end just so that I could say I stuck my foot into Lake Michigan.  Done.

After the beach, it was time to head back to our hotel and unwind, have dinner and go to bed!  Goodbye, Chicago!  Next stop, Wisconsin!

Max Behind The Wheel

This is another video I took while waiting for my kids after school.

I once had to move my car really quickly and didn't have a chance to strap Max in his car seat.  We were only going to move a couple of feet so I didn't think there was any harm in putting him in my lap and driving those few feet.  When I started to drive and turn the wheel so slightly I got this loud squeal of delight from him.  He thought it was the best thing ever!

I was trying to recreate that laugh but didn't get it quite the same, but this video shows how happy he is to be behind the wheel.

Happy Halloween - Star Wars

 

This year my kids decided to dress up as a character on Star Wars.  I was surprised no one wanted to be Darth Vader.

My boys all wanted to be some sort of Jedi.  Bernadette, of course, wanted to be Princess Leia and Anne wanted to be Queen Amidalla (aka Darth Vader's mother).  If you are familiar with the movies, Queen Amidalla is quite extravagant in her wardrobe and make-up.

This year I felt like Halloween was an all day event instead of just an evening thing.  It all started the night before with the pumpkin carving.  After that, I stayed up and made cookies for Anne's Halloween party the next day.  I got an idea from watching the Food Network a few days ahead to make Witches' Fingers.


I thought they were absolutely cute, but wondered if it was too much for a Halloween festive snack?

The next day was going to the Halloween parade and then having to attend an after school haunted house party that Anne was face-painting for.

After that, the kids and I went home.  It was already 4:30!  I made a hot pot of chili, cleaned up the house a bit and started getting the kids ready for the evening. 

This year, my in-laws came over to pass out candy.  This was great because the kids love seeing their grandparents and sharing Halloween with them is special.  I'm always leaving a bucket outside for trick-or-treaters and it's always nice to be able to actually have someone answer the door. 

It got dark so quickly - so I had to get my pictures done!

We were a little disappointed in the headpiece - it's really flimsy plastic, but she looks really good nonetheless. 

 

I had fun putting her make-up on. Her costume improved a lot with the make-up!  Fun stuff.

Tommy is Luke Skywalker. 

 

 

This is his Jedi pose.

 

 

Patrick just chose to be a Jedi - no one in particular.  He's a young Jedi, I guess.

 

 

Eddie just woke up from a late afternoon nap and was a very cranky Jedi.  He was on the verge of going to the Dark side.

 

 

My cute little princess.  The costume actually had her buns attached to a big wig piece that looked so fake!  I just cut the buns off and sewed them onto a elastic headband.  Looked so much better!

 

 

Max broke tradition this year.  The baby usually wears a Santa costume, but he had to be Yoda this year.  Someone took a look at him and thought he was a bunny.  Bunny, I am not!

 

 

My Star Wars crew.

 

We had a great evening.  We went down another road this year which has a lot more traffic.  Tommy was hoping to run into some of his friends.  Halloween was pretty fancy schmancy on this road.  One house had two cotton candy machines passing out huge sticks of sugar out to every kid!  One house had an interactive game to get your candy and another road was sealed off so they could create a bonfire in the middle. 

 

It started to sprinkle in the middle of our trick-or-treating and definitely dampened the mood a bit.  My kids were getting tired.  Joe ended up finding us and joined us for the rest of the way.  That was the best part of the night for me!  When we got back to our house we were informed that our house got 70+ trick-or-treaters!  Wow, that's a lot.  Thank goodness I bought enough candy.

 

I'm a little upset I can't get my pictures to get larger.  Something is not working too well today on the world of BLOG!





Max laughing

This year, I'm noticing I am spending a lot of time in the car.  I've always heard other moms talk about how they live in their car because of shuttling their kids to and from their activities.  I always wondered if that would be me one day.  I drop-off and pick-up my kids from school.  I'm not ready for them to walk a mile home yet.  Tommy has football practice and choir.  Anne has band practice.  Eddie has speech therapy.  With JUST that, there is some idle time in the car.  The kids and I end up playing with my phone and create some cute videos.  I thought I would share some once in a while. 

This one was taken after Mass and a family grocery run on a Sunday.  Max is usually the last one out of the van.  Tommy was making him laugh - what a great sound that is! 

Max is now 10.5 months now.  He's growing fast!

 

I still have to finish our cross country trip, but I'll have to start mixing it up.

Downtown Chicago

The months leading up to our cross country trip I thought it would be fun to make all of us a special shirt that we could all wear during our trip.  I know families have shirts made through a company or the like, but I thought it would be more fun to make tie dye shirts.  It would be a project for the kids and I to do and would serve a purpose for our trip.  Boom, two birds with one stone!

I remember doing it as kid with buckets of dye and white shirts that were scrunched together with rubber bands.  When I went to the craft store they had tie dye kits for about $10.  Cool!  We all sat around the TV as we watched "how to" make the different designs.  Each kid chose his design and Anne and I got to work.  This became a mother-daughter project since the boys chose not to help - which was fine because we had a lot of fun.

So we are already on day 8 of our trip and we still haven't worn our shirts.  We decided this would be the day!

Out of all the shirts, I liked Max's the most!

We decided to go downtown and visit Millennium Park.

What a fun place.  As soon as we got there, the first thing we see are The Crown Fountains.  I certainly didn't read about this place before coming so I wasn't expecting to see this.

I've never seen anything like this before!  The kids just went crazy and wanted to play in the water.  How could we not let them, right?  If I did read about Millennium Park before we got there, I would have brought bathing suits and towels.  Our first stop for the day and our children get soaked!  It was another beautiful day with mild temps and blue skies!  Just loving it!

Lots of squeals of delight!

Thank goodness Max stayed put in his stroller!  He stayed nice and dry.

It would have been perfect to have Max in the middle of this photo, but that wasn't going to happen.  We already get comments from random people when crossing paths with this big family of 8, now we were more of a spectacle with being a big family of 8 in tie dye shirts!  I certainly don't mind showing off our beautiful family - I'm blessed - but the tie dye may have embarrassed me a bit!  I got over it eventually, but people are free with their comments as usual!

We eventually left the Crown Fountains and started exploring.

There were art sculptures all over the park.  In this one, it looks like someone dumped water all over the sculpture and Bernadette.

This is Anne being one with the art (by Jun Kaneko).

We walked through the Lurie Gardens.  I just love the skyline of Chicago.  It is such a beautiful city.

Once we got through the Lurie Gardens we heard some music and knew something was going on.  We approached the Jay Pritzker Pavillion and on it's Great Lawn they were having a huge Zumba class!  The music was lively and there were tons of people participating in this Zumba class.  We stood watching.  There were all sorts of people exercising from old men to bag ladies - all shaking their thang!  It was almost contagious to go out there and join them - didn't happen.  This is definitely something I don't see everyday.

Then we headed over to a red tent which had something going on inside. 

I don't really remember exactly what it was, but I think it was something Target was sponsoring and they had a bunch of activities for kids.  So our kids stopped by to play a bit.

Then we headed off to my favorite part of the park...

The Cloud Gate, aka The Bean.  I remember reading or seeing this before and again, didn't realize I was going to be seeing it that day.  I think it was a neat idea of putting this in the middle of the park.  It's not just a piece of art, but a fun toy for people of all ages!  You can just see why it's fun to hang around.  It's a big mirror shaped like a bean that distorts it's reflections in a fun way.

There we are together in our tie dye!

At this point my kids are damp not wet.  Drying off still...

You can get under this bean and get some cool reflections.

After walking around Millennium Park we decided to walk through the city, down Michigan Ave.,  and get some lunch. 

What a fun city.  I keep having to compare it to New York when I talk about it.  It's just more open, cleaner, friendlier people, classier, prettier - however, New York is classic, artful, interesting and is really a city that is always awake!  I'd choose Chicago to live in, however.

You know you watch a lot of movies when you start recalling a bunch of different scenes from movies when you look at the Chicago River.  Gotta get a picture of it!

We walked around Chicago for a while.  Had to find a potty for Eddie to use.  And then find a corner to nurse Max.

We walked through an art fair which was nice.  We headed back to our car and realized we lost one of Bernadette's bright green crocs halfway there.  The kids and I parked ourselves near a building on Michigan Ave. and timed Daddy to see how long it would take for him to return to us.  I think we clocked him at a little over 12 minutes.

Once we got to the car, we went on a drive to visit where my father-in-law grew up.  There were two homes that he lived in which were very close to each other.  We took pictures of us there and then we headed back to our hotel to call it a day!

We rested up at our hotel for another day downtown.  We were going to head to Lincoln Park Zoo and also spend time at the beach along Lake Michigan!

4th of July in Chicago

We left Ohio and headed to Chicago on the fourth of July.  We drove most of the day and got there just in time to check into our hotel and head to a local celebration.  Our hotel was near the airport and we found a place to celebrate not too far away! 

When we got there, it was a familiar scene of tons of people walking to the same place looking for the perfect spot to lay their blankets and stuff.  We had no idea where the fireworks were going to show up since it was a large park with a huge lake in the middle.  We used our imagination and decided on a spot.  It was also really near the food!

The kids stayed with me while Joe went and got some food for everyone.  He came back with a large pizza and some Mexican food!  I'm always hungry and remember the food as being really yummy.  As we were waiting for the food, the kids noticed all the other kids playing with toys that glowed.  They saw some swords that lit up like light sabers and Bernadette was eyeing the battery operated bubble gun.  There were bubbles everywhere!

After eating, Joe took the kids out and about to look around since we had some time to kill.  When they came back, they had a bunch of those toys that lit up and that bubble gun Bernadette was eyeing.  They all decided they would help Daddy with some of their own money to purchase all these fun toys.  Joe said that the guy selling the toys didn't realize what a hit they were going to be.  They were all sold out - our kids got the last double sword thingymabobby.

 

Eddie came back with some cotton candy.

 



We watched the sun go down, listened to a really good band playing Journey songs in the background while the kids played with their toys.  We were getting a little wet from all the bubbles coming our way from every direction, but the sound of their laughter and look of their smiles was just awesome as we enjoyed the gorgeous evening.

The fireworks started at 9:30pm!  To me, that's late.  I seem to think that they usually start at 9pm.  What's half an hour?  A lot when you have 6 kids.  Thankfully, it didn't matter.  The kids were great and having fun!  The fireworks started and our view was pretty good since they had one on either side of us.  I'm not sure if that was planned or another celebration going on at the same time.  Anyway - stunning fireworks!  All the kids enjoyed it, even Max who didn't show any signs of being tired.  No one was scared of the loud noises.  Yeh!

Overall, a great evening!  Thank you Chicago! 

The next day, we were going downtown!

Cross Country Conintued - Butler, PA & Toledo, OH

I really tried to blog about our cross country trip, but with all the craziness involved with sneaking a family of 8 into one hotel room, getting kids ready for bed, getting ready for the next day, winding down AND rarely getting a strong Internet connection, made blogging not possible.

The three weeks of traveling has now turned into one huge blurred event in my head.  I no longer have those great details of the trip in my head to share, but still have the highlights - I think, we'll see.

Thank God, we have the itinerary Joe made on an excel spreadsheet I can refer to as I continue to record our travels.

Tuesday, July 2-3

After leaving Niagara Falls, we headed to Butler, OH to visit Joe's brother's family.  Tom and his family live furthest away from us and our visits are rare.  The kids were so excited to play with their cousins.  When we arrived, their cousin Timmy shared all the Star Wars toys they had!  This provided endless entertainment for my kids since they are consumed by world of the Jedi at the present time!  We spent the evening eating pizza and chatting while the kids played.

The next morning, the kids spent the morning playing Wii.  Our kids just spent their money combined on a Wii set and it arrived right before we left for our cross country trip.  The kids were so happy to be playing Wii and looked forward to coming home to play some more.

 

 

After the kids played for a while, the grown ups played a game or two.  It became pretty competitive between Joe and Tom and it spilled over into the kids' cheering for their dads!  That competitive spirit is contagious!

 

After, eating lunch it was time to continue our trip.  It was a short, but nice visit! 

 



Our next destination was the Toledo Zoo.  We love to visit zoos and see the animals.  The highlight of this zoo were the polar bears!  It was crowded, perhaps because the polar bears were very active when we visited.

We were also told that the hippos (old time favorite animal) had a great show at this zoo, but we were a little disappointed because we couldn't get a good look at them. 

Did I mention how great the weather was?  Our whole trip was so pleasant with mild weather.  It makes for really great traveling!  It was even better knowing we were away from the sweltering weather back home - yeah!

This picture reminds me of the fish we left at home.  We have a 10 gallon and a 50 gallon fish tank at home filled with tropical fish.  We had a neighbor who graciously volunteered to feed our fish twice a day!  So blessed to have good neighbors.  This particular fish would not fit into our tank.

This was the first of many zoos we visited on our cross country trip.  We spent the night in Toledo.  Our original plan was to head over to Indianapolis, IN the next day and hang out at the Indianapolis Speedway and then celebrate the fourth of July somewhere near or in the city, but because of rain in the forecast, we decided to head straight to Chicago, IL and spend the fourth of July over there.