The Windy City

As we were in Chicago on Sunday, I realized that I never posted the photos from our end of summer trip to Chicago to pick Daddy up from work. One of the perks of being a teacher now is that Bob has his summers off.  Correction, he has his summer off to work another full-time job. Lucky man! Seriously though, he does have a pretty cool summer (and part-time during the school year) gig downtown Chicago at an international architecture firm, specializing in high tech facilities...creating world class projects.

The kids kept hearing talk about this "Chicago" place where Bob took the train daily, so on his last day of work in early August, the kids and I drove down, picked him up, did a little sightseeing, and grabbed dinner. The kids had a ball!

The Bean! 

They agreed that it was really cool.

 The next cool thing, the Crown Fountain

 Timid at first, but not for long...a stranger called her a little Lucille Ball

He didn't want to leave and he was soaking wet, something we hadn't plan for.

I hadn't watch this clip until just now. I think it's pretty cute but I am a little disgusted that it looks like they are going to drink the water at the end. I don't remember this, but they did call it the "Drinking Fountain" and continue to call it that to this day.

Bob went in to work on this past Sunday to help with a big deadline. We picked him up in the afternoon and had another trip downtown to Millennium Park. The kids were so excited to see the Bean and the "Drinking Fountain" again. They were just sad they couldn't play in the water. It was much too cold this time. 

We saw lots of runners that had finished the Chicago Marathon. Reed didn't seem the point of running if they knew they weren't going to win. We tried to explain that one to him but decided to just let it go. Neither Bob or I ever see ourselves running 26 miles for "fun" or any of the plethora of other reasons runners do it.

We had one more stop due to Reed's revised career aspirations. Recently he decided that he no longer wants to be a race car driver. He wants to be a paleontologist. I was quite impressed that he knew that job title and am very willing to encourage digging up dinosaur bones over driving cars really fast. So we walked down to the Lakefront and peered down to the Museum Campus paying special note to the Field Museum. He knew that's where his meat-eating friend, Sue, lives and that is our next Chicago destination, one which needed to wait for another day.