Prepare yourself: This post is full of pictures. I won't bother to describe them all, so here's the quick over-view.
As a final fling before summer was over, we made an impromptu trip to Chicago. Most of the pictures are of that. Ethan made his first train ride (we took the train in to Chicago, or "Sickago" as Ethan calls it). We left early in the morning and rode for about 3 hours, then walked to our hotel, dropped off our bags and headed to the Museum of Science and Industry. The kids enjoyed it and liked some of the hands-on exhibits. Andrew and I enjoyed getting to tour a real captured German submarine. It was suffocatingly tiny and so hard to believe that men actually lived in it for months at a time. Heck....they were probably sort of glad to be captured! (Kidding, I think!)
We went to the Rainforest Cafe for dinner and then all crashed for the night.
The next day we headed to the Shedd Aquarium. We spent several hours looking at the fish and sea life, watched a dolphin show that included a couple of Beluga whales and just enjoyed the day together. After that, we took a boat ride from the aquarium across the water to Navy Pier, where we ate dinner at Bubba Gump's and spent the rest of the lovely evening looking in shops and walking up and down the pier. All in all, it was a lovely little getaway.
Oh, and the first few pictures are just some random kid pictures. The first two with face paint were from the day we accidently went to Chick-fil-a on their birthday. They had free face painting, free food, free birthday cake and free prizes. The kids had a great time.
And then there's Ethan. Clearly, potty training hasn't quite clicked yet, if the placement of underwear is any indicator!
