Chicago

Last week we took our yearly trip to visit all of the Schmitt family in Chicago. We had a jam-packed week planned, and we are very happy to say the trip was an outright success! A few highlights....

Sunday:
It was Fathers day so the whole family got together for a Family brunch. The absolute highlight of the morning was getting together all of the kids. John Grayson and Delia had the chance to meet their 2nd cousin Blake for the first time. Blake was born a few weeks before Delia but seemed to be much bigger than that when we had them sit next to each other.

Delia had a great time playing with Blake. JGray wanted to get in on the action so we tried to pose them all together in a chair. If you have ever tried to get 3 kids under 3 to all face a camera and smile at the same time, it is quite the challenge. This was the best shot we were able to get.
Monday:
We took the opportunity on Monday to visit the DuPage Children's Museum in Naperville. It was a very nice museum with all kinds of exhibits that JGray liked.
The highlight of the museum for JGray was their 'Construction' area where the let the kids build stuff with real tools. While my son worked with these tools on his project I feared for my (our) safety quite a bit, but I figured seeing that they were all hand (not power) tools we were less likely to lose a finger. After 20 minute of hard work JGray produced his project:
It may be hard to see, but this masterpiece is a block of wood with one nail in it, a hole that we drilled, and a few cuts from where we used the saw. I don't know exactly what we call it (or what we will do with it) but our son was very proud of his work...for about 5 minutes.

Tuesday:
On Tuesday morning we headed down the Field Museum with Grandma and Great Aunt Sally. John Grayson had been talking about getting to meet 'Sue' (the worlds most complete T-Rex fossil) for quite some time. To say the least he was not disappointed.
Not only did they have Sue in the Great Hall, they had an entire Dinosaur fossil exhibit where we spent quite a bit of time. I continue to be impressed with my son's ability to name all of the Dinosaurs. Although, I do have to apologize in advance to Pachycephalosaurus. Some months back when reading to JGray about him I could not pronounce his name I just called him Syphilis the dinosaur who makes the sound "CLAP, CLAP, CLAP". Much to my (and all of his future pre-school teachers) chagrin, he continues to repeat this when asked about his favorite dinosaurs.
We continued on through many of the other natural history exhibits. JGray was always willing to give us the sounds that the animals made or what they did. One of my favorites was at the bear exhibit when he decided to show us how bears walked....
Wednesday:
On Wednesday we headed down to the Brookfield Zoo with our friends Mike and Jennie. We thought we were going to be quite lucky because they had a great exhibit called Dinosaurs, LIVE! that would be a great opportunity for our son to meet many of his idols.
What we soon realized was that Dinosaurs are very cool to John Grayson in books or in fossil form, but when they are life size robots that move and roar at you it became all too real.
As you could see here, John Grayson spent the majority of the time with his head buried into our shoulders whenever he saw meat eating dinosaurs such as our friend T-Rex hear. For some reason he was ok when we saw others like Stegosaurus who did not eat meat. He proceeded to tell anyone who had ears for the rest of the week that dinosaurs are now real, he saw them, and they are scary. We went to go see other exhibits, for both John Grayson and I our favorite exhibit was the Tropic World Gorilla exhibit.
We could have spend all day just watching them play around, but our time was limited so we had to get our ride on the carousel and get home for nap.
Thursday:
We didn't do much on Thursday, mostly because I went out with Grandpa to play a round of golf. This gave Delia the opportunity to spend some quality time with her Great Grandma.
Friday:
Recognizing that this year Grandma and Grandpa were not going to be able to make it out for John Grayson's birthday, we had a special birthday celebration for all of the Naperville family. I am a bit concerned that our son is going to start believing that his birthday celebration lasts an entire month each year...

On Saturday we all headed home back to Richmond. We had such a great time and are so thankful that we got to spend so much time with our Family while we were there. We can't wait to go back next year!