Saturday was also the start of my Child Life conference. The conference was held at the Lurie's Children's Hospital of Chicago. It was about a half mile walk from our hotel, which only took me about ten minutes. Here was the view from my check in.
It started with a great speaker and was pretty good the rest of the day. There was a lot of sitting and my body is just not used to it so by the end my legs and hips were cramping up pretty bad.
While I was there, Kyle loaded the kids up and explored the Field Museum, which was free with our Minnesota Science Museum membership. He didn't want to tackle the bus ride alone so they ended up walking the mile and a half to the museum. Isaac was quiet the trooper I hear.
We were pretty excited for Isaac to see the mummy because we had just finished the Magic Treehouse Book: Mummies in the Morning.
Kyle said the kids were so good for him and loved the museum. He said he even got a few compliments from other museum people saying "your kids are so well behaved, we all really appreciate that here" lol. He also said Isaac was having a blast and would run out of every exhibit exclaiming "I LOVE THIS PLACE!" Kyle said it was pretty awesome to witness.
Meanwhile I had a unnecessarily long lunch break, but it did give me a chance to walk back to my hotel and change shoes. And to stretch my legs a bit. Here was a couple nice views on my walk.
Kyle and the kids spent about 5 hours at the museum then went for another long walk up north to the area where I was. They walked up along Lake Michigan another 2 miles. They passed by thousands of rugby fans going to soldier field. Kyle was pushing the girls in the stroller and at times had Isaac on his shoulders, he got some entertaining looks from passersby.
There was Cub pride everywhere.
Emma got a stroller nap in and they ended at the playground outside the hospital waiting for me to finish up.
I finished about 4:00 and we were all ready for dinner. We had heard about this asian place called Wow Boa so we wanted to check it out since it was close. When we arrived we saw it was more of a food court type place to eat with no seating and we really wanted to sit down (well Kyle and Isaac did) The boa looked so good so we got some to go as an appetizer.
We ended up having dinner at a burrito place, then heading back to the hotel. The kids really wanted to swim again so we squeezed that in before bed.
The next morning we got all packed up and took our luggage into holding. I headed back to my conference.
Everywhere was flying the W with pride, it was pretty fun to experience Chicago at this time.
My first session was medical play, that was fun!
And the family headed to Navy Pier to the Children's Museum which was free for the first Sunday of the Month. When they arrived it hadn't opened yet so they spent some time exploring the Pier. The girls were holding hands, too cute.
It was good for the kids to have a morning play session since the ladder part of the day was going to be spent on a train.
Isaac taking a rest from all his walking the past few days
I had to leave the conference early to catch our train at 2:35 or what we thought was 2:35. I left after lunch and met back up with the fam at Whole Foods where we bought dinner for the train and a hot lunch to eat there. We went back and got our luggage and waited for our bus.
This wasn't our bus but shows how fun the town was the whole time we were there.
Waiting and waiting. The bus was running late and just as we had pulled up the Uber app to try and find a car it pulled around the corner. We hopped on quickly and got settled as we headed toward Union Station. It was about 1:43 at this time.
We were talking about where the train would board and where we needed to go so I looked up the tickets on my phone to discover the train actually departs at 2:15!!! Holy shit did stress hit the fan, but there was absolutely nothing we could do about it except sit there on the bus and sweat. And pray, and pray I did. We prepped the kids explaining as soon as we got to our stop we were be in a very big hurry, needing to run, and it was very important they listen and do as we say. We loaded the girls into the stroller before our stop so we could rush off. We ran to the station and of course the handicap entrance was across the street but we were there at the amtrak area so we just huffed the stroller with girls in tow down the three flights of stairs into Union Station. We ran to the ticket counter where I quickly said "we are running late going to Minneapolis" the guys says "you have three minutes, go down that way take a left, then another left and keep going. You have three minutes to get on that train you better go". So we RAN! And God answered our prayers as we made it to our bus and hurried to some seats. The train attendant was very helpful, got us seats together and loaded our luggage for us. Phew it was quiet the miracle we made it!
Good bye Chicago
Once our hearts stopped racing and our stomachs returned back into place, we were able to relax and enjoy the train ride.
We did spend most of this trip in our seats, we made it to the observation deck once but didn't stay there long. We did get to see a beautiful sunset.
And had lots of iPad time
The return trip was much bumpier than the trip there. We watched part of a movie together, five of us in two seats. We stopped about halfway through the movie to stretch and take a bathroom break. Isaac finished up the movie while Kyle and I got the girls to finally fall asleep.
We arrived back home about 10:00pm. Emma was a little grumpy from being woken up but was happy to be home.
St. Paul's Union Station
Thanks to daylight savings time we all got pretty good rest the night before. But everyone was glad to be back in their own beds.
1 comment:
Beautiful, It is one of the best and sweetest part of everyone's life to spend whole time with kids. Great trip shared, I enjoyed, come again with more trips like this.
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