Chicago Birthday

My amazing husband and I waiting for public transportation in wonderfully blissful Chicago (or it just seemed like that because I had such a great time with the one I love)
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I had the most wonderful Birthday weekend this year. Brian and I took a weekend trip to Chicago. Thanks to my wonderful sister-in-law for volunteering to watch the kids (and my mother-in-law), we were able to have a wonderful, uplifting, relationship building, weekend together as husband and wife.We were on the go constantly and saw everything that we possible could fit into our schedules. I left on Thursday morning feeling like, "I can't believe I am going to have a baby in 10 weeks" and came home on Sunday feeling like, "I still have ten weeks left!!" Lets just say it is exhausting walking all over a big city, huge museums, running up and down a million subway stairs over the course of three days and not resting at all!!! I am feeling the pregnancy now!!!! On more than one occasion Brian had to help me tie my shoe or remind me that I was walking like a penguin we saw at Fantasea at the Shedd Aquarium. Oh, well. It was still an amazing weekend!!

We drove to Chicago on Thursday evening and checked into the Hyatt Place hotel. We actually stayed right outside the city in Lombard, IL. We wanted to go to dinner and I literally have never seen so many restaurants in one place so close together before. Luckily we all ready had our restaurants that we wanted to eat at picked out. There is no way I could have made a decision (that is one thing I am not very good at, I am not a decision maker!!) We had some points on a credit card that we redeemed for Restaurant gift cards and both of the ones we wanted just happened to be within a block of our hotel. Seriously, there were restaurants everywhere!!So we went to Claim Jumper for dinner and had a wonderful time. It was as good as we remembered it from Vegas. I was looking forward to that for a long time (we don't have any of those around us here). They also have this "Motherload" chocolate cake that is to die for. It is 7 layers of deliciousness. It is so big that it took us all three days of Chicago to finish it. That was my birthday cake for my birthday trip!! AMAZING!!

Next we went to IKEA to walk around. I think that store is so fun, especially when you can enjoy it and look at what you want because you don't have the kids tagging along!! I find that is what happened all weekend. It is nice to be able to do something and take your time because for once you are not on your kids schedule.

We turned in for the night after that and went to the Hotel to plan our public transportation route from site to site on our jam packed schedule for the following day. Oh, and we needed to get back to the hotel to catch the end of the Laker Game! of course!

Here I am getting ready for our first day on the town looking nice and chunky and prego. It's a great look!
First we drove downtown and found some awesome parking right next to the subway stop that was going to be our main stop.

but before we hopped on the subway we took a bus up to the Shedd Aquarium. This was so much fun. there was so much to see.


Is this a rock or a fish?

Here we are waiting for a show to start.....



There is a show called the Fantasea at the Shedd Aquarium. It was very entertaining. It wasn't just animals doing tricks it was almost like a story with the animals.


They picked an audience member to go on the journey with them and it was very sweet. This boat came from the ceiling and picked up this little girl and then it floated over the water to a little island. There were sea lions, penguins, beluga whales, dolphins, hawks, and many characters.


There were some pretty amazing views of the city form this aquarium, even though it was very foggy. It was a great start to our touring!!Next we ran over to the field museum which is all about natural history. It was interesting. We were pretty hungry (well, at least I was of course!) so we weren't as interested as we probably should have been. It was huge and full of neat things. Very cool if you are into that kind of history. Lots of Mummies, dinosaurs, pyramids, native americas, and things under the ground. they had an exhibit where you go through a "shrinking" room to make you the size of an ant and you get to learn about soil and bugs. It was funny!




Here is Brian at the top of a Pyramid.

After the Field Museum we went to a Must have when in Chicago. Lou Malnati's Chicago Style Pizza. It was soo yummy!!!After lunch we went to The Sears (well Willis now) tower to the sky deck. It was so cloudy that the building was too high up in the clouds and we could not see a thing. Oh well, Our go Cards got us up there for free so we thought we might as well go. It was still a neat experience and you could still go stand out on the glass and look down and tell that you were suspended over 100 stories high! As far as the view......... Let's just say it looked like they installed white windows all

the way around their building.
So we left there and just walked the streets. We founds some cool statues, We also went to the Macy's, and then found our way to Millennium Park. There we watched the ice skaters, saw some more art and the cloud gate. the cloud gate was pretty cool. We got a kick out of taking pictures of ourselves and the city.






After all this fun we ended the night close to the hotel at P.F. Changs and turned in early to watch the end of another Laker game. I, however, was asleep before the first basket was even made. It is very tiring for a 7 month pregnant woman to haul all over town like that on foot!!

Day 2 on the town was no less busy! It started out at the Museum of Science and Industry. It may sound boring but it was so cool. We could have spent a lot more time in there but limited ourselves to the morning.

There was a U-505 submarine (the only German Sub in the US) with a crazy interesting story behind it's capture, the war, everything about the sub, and eventually its journey to Chicago.
Also in this museum was everything from agriculture and farming
to the White House, and science of the body. There were whole wings dedicated to space, legos (art), cars, planes, you name it, it was there! Very cool place.

Then we waited outside for our bus for about 45 minutes until we finally decided to go to another bus stop. Right as we got there we saw our bus pull up to the museum so we ran back (not easy to do) only to find out she was stopping there for 20 minutes. Ugh! we were so frustrated and I was so exhausted. It was quite the waste of time. Such is life I guess!

From there we went to the planetarium and saw a neat show in a dome theater.
Again, we were too hungry and tired to be as interested as we should so we decided to catch a hot dog on the street and head to our next destination. The Hershey store! We went in and looked around and got the kids some pretty big Hershey kisses. We headed over to the Giradeli Chocolate store (not very impressed) and then headed to the John Hancock observatory. Again we could not see a thing from the top of the building but the elevator ride was pretty cool (96 floors in 40 sec). Since no views we accesible to us and we had to base our opinion on the buildings and we enjoyed the Hancock tower a lot better than the Sears Tower.

Only one more adventure for the night~ we went to a comedy sports show. It was sooo hilarious and very clean. It was a competition between a red team and a blue team. They were asked to do a bunch of silly games and we got to choose which team we thought was better. They even had such a thing called a "brown bag fowl" where no one(including the audience) was allowed to cuss or say anything dirty. If they accidentally did, they had to wear a brown bag for the remainder fo the skit. It actually happened to an audience member when they asked the audience to offer a line from a movie. It was so funny. We had such a great time.

We ended the night at Benihana where we had a hilarious chef and a great time. And did not get home until about 11:00. I could barely walk to the room. Completely exhausted but completely happy.

Sunday morning we headed home. We stopped just outside Chicago for Sacrament meeting and then headed to Brian's Parents to get the kids. While there we had dinner and a Birthday cake with his family and the kids. It was so sweet and all I can say is I think this may have been one of the best Birthday's ever!!!!