sweet (old) home chicago

We took a long overdue mini-vacation/weekend trip to visit sweet, sweet Chicago, our home for almost the first 3 years of our marriage. It was great to go back and visit good friends and enjoy the city that we love so much!

Pete's camera got a bit broken a few weeks ago and the flash no longer stays down unless taped which makes things a little more difficult to take pictures and so we didn't capture all of the family fun that was had this weekend but here are a few highlights.

Ethan got to take a spin in the office chair at our hotel.
Saturday was our monster-see all our friends-day and Ethan especially loved when our friends The Carlsons and their 11 month old son Chase took us to a free indoor park a few blocks from our condo.

For some reason every time Pete tried to take a picture of Ethan the pics would end up like this.
You can see that Chase is very concerned and empathetic.
Shortly after they were at the window sill trying to check out what was going on outside.
Right after the above picture Ethan must have knocked his teeth on the window sill, which led to...
(Again, Chase is very concerned for his friend).

After our very crazy, but great Saturday visiting with 4 sets of friends we decided to have Sunday be a fun, family day with just the 3 of us enjoying the city. We took a long 5 mile walk in the morning to have some breakfast and see some of the sites.
Here we are at the famous bean.
We headed back to the hotel, rested and got ready for the day to head out for another walk - this time along Michigan Ave. Ethan was so tired he fell asleep for an hour while we walked amongst honking horns, city buses, and lots and lots of people.
One of the things I wanted to be sure to do was enjoy some Chicago style pizza and so we had lunch at Lou Mahlnati's. We ordered a child size spaghetti for Ethan and when we got it I was thinking it was way too big but, I forgot how much our little man loves spaghetti! He ate the whole bowl! As you can see, he was determined to feed himself, and so we let him.
Pete wanted to get a few pictures of himself and Ethan in front of Wrigley before we left and so we made a quick trip up north to the stadium from downtown.
Unfortunately our "quick trip" up north turned into an extra 2 hours sitting in lots and lots of traffic which we were all not so happy about (one thing we definitely do not miss about Chicago!).

All in all, it was a great weekend full of reminiscing, good times with good friends and getting a chance to share our love for Chicago with our little man. Can't wait until we get to go back for another visit! :)