Chicago!

We left Thursday right after school and made the 3.5 hour drive in about 4.5 hour since we stopped for dinner on the way. Our girls haven't done many road trips that are more than an hour but they did really well. Katie has been soooo excited about this trip which helped Ben and me focus more on the fun of it and less on the work of it. Travelling with small children is not what I call relaxing but it was great to be off on an adventure for a couple of days and everyone had a good time.

Chicago has some fantastic sites for kids. Lots of kid friendly museums. We started out Friday morning at the aquarium. This is the only family picture we got the whole trip and actually we didn't end up with every many pictures at all. That's okay though, as my sister Becky said recently--sometimes it's better to enjoy the experience than to always be worrying about capturing the perfect pictures.After the Aquarium we went to the Museum of natural history. Katie was very excited about seeing real dinosaur bones. I love how Annabelle is just chilling and I love love love Katie's scary dinosaur face in the picture.

So much so that I decided to crop it and blow it up. Can you tell that she lost a tooth on our drive the day before?

We had lunch at the Rain Forest restaurant--very fun. It is set up to feel like you are in a rainforest including a waterfall and a twinkling starry night sky.

At the Museum of Science and Industry they had a lot of really neat exhibits. This one was of an old fashioned town which included a dentist office.
Not pictured above but part of our fun experience was: the Children's Museum, swimming in the hotel pool, and a real taxi ride.

I think what I loved most about this trip was how excited Katie was to go and how much she loved everything we did. It was a delight to see her anticipation and see how much she enjoyed seeing and doing new things. She was so excited about the trip that she packed her own suitcase in advance. On the day we were leaving I went to check her suitcase and pack for real for her but I didn't need to. She had neatly folded her pajamas and outfits including underwear and socks each stacked in the order she would need them for the trip. I didn't need to add or change anything she had done. She had even packed her swimming suit.